CD9K

thanks mate, yeah you could be right but I kind of felt this before ashwaganda too - but I did take a month off from it and started feeling a lot more feelings (both positive and negative, more tilt whilst playing but more enjoyment from social activities). I've apparently already seen this video but I'll give it a rewatch, ty

idk, the cost of cfp is so low for what it gives you unless you have scam deal, so go for that probably

I can't remember exactly but what I would say to myself now is just move up as fast as possible, aggressive BRM, get a job to build BR - aslong as you can get your mental game to a stable enough place then your technical will very quickly be enough if table selecting up to 200nl/500nl . The exact BI numbers idk but can play around with variance calculator, something like 25bi for each stake or even 10/15bi if playing 100nl or lower cus losing it would have absolutely 0 impact on your life in most western countries (but ideally play a stake where you can get a decent sample to know you're winning)

https://forum.gipsyteam.ru/index.php?viewtopic=85514&st=10640

Thanks for the kind words, yeah 10k games can be nice but they dont run often ;(

I've been in Asia for last 2 weeks taking the first amount of time off from poker since I started playing pretty much, I did study a fair bit of HU whilst there though

I've been in a bit of a dilemma recently, even if I have mental strength, bankroll and skill to play NL5k table selecting there is no games running (with a fish). I could spend 15 hours a day watching the lobbies and only find maybe 150 hands/day with a fish at 5k some days

It makes me wonder how did nosebleed guys ever get to where they are unless they had a great opportunity or better game quality.

So like demondoink+nachos I briefly considered the option of grinding out a living like King10Clubs at 1kNL as there seems to be a lot of games running there, and could basically do what I did this last year and make around 200k USD give or take.

But there are some mental hang ups in doing that, some from JNandez recent podcast and some from sold old Stefan blogposts I read through:
1) I want to do something I'm proud of, I'm not particularly proud of table selecting and settling at 1k.
2) I've been trying new formats which I think have nice future longevity, are more enjoyable for me and potentially have higher winrate reg vs reg at 2k-5k for more consistent volume (specifically HU NLH and HU PLO4) - But the issue with this is that I can't see any proven winners on these formats to give me confidence that it is indeed possible to beat rake regbattling. As JNandez put well in his podcast, it's very scary to play a higher variance format with complete uncertainty about your winrate (It would take so many months to get a reasonable sample to guess my true winrate, I don't know how it works exactly but I'd assume that since standard deviation is higher it means that it takes more than 6max samples to attain true winrate, so maybe as much as 300k hands+ which is like over 1.5 years of HU play)
3) The other option is regbattling 2k 3/6max which seems a bit meh, like I look at the top volume regs for this and it seems like no-one is winning more than 2bb/100 and if they are its a tiny sample/they have table selected in previous years when games were better. But my hangup with giving up on this is that Stefan says in his blog something along the lines of "It's possible to have 10bb/100 regbattling at 2k 5k where everyone sucks and is just copying solver" which could be true, maybe I am just another solver copier who thinks they are deviating/creating nice explo lines but isn't doing it enough. My WR 3-5 handed this year has been 1.21bb/100 over 100k hands which says nothing and is basically no $ lol.
4) The other solution people often give is to play live poker, this isn't really an option for me as I'm locked down to being in London for various personal reasons. I also don't enjoy the experience/find any competitive drive to play live, except maybe some time back in Macau as that game had a very fun dynamic (deep stack, same regs, long sessions, lots of spots)

Lastly I'm somewhat aware that this is an internal battle of ego, as Jnandez said inside my head there is a business owner and a worker, their desires are overlapping. The owner wants the worker to just do the task of grinding out 1k volume and pump $, the worker wants to satisfy their ego and get recognition at higher and higher stakes.

Stefan had some interesting posts about how ego, dopamine, serotonin were all interlinked - That by playing poker (pumping dopamine) and feeding your ego you end up in a place where your dopamine receptors are fucked and your level of serotonin/happiness is low (I skimmed this late last night so I might be misunderstanding a bit). I can definitely feel my self drifting into this sort of place, where I go through periods of struggling to get dopamine from usual activities and only think about poker. I wonder if soon I too will stop satisfying my ego and put poker on the backburner for something else, but I feel that this game is too fun for me. I came from a video game background and saw this as the most lucrative competitive game, thats what drew me in and kept me in so I can't see myself continuing long term if I stop playing the 'game' of climbing the ladder...

Lastly something I want to look into is figuring out a way to gauge my edge by looking at common solver spots and figuring out from showdowns if people are playing nodes wrong in HU NLH/HU PLO and from that calculate a potential winrate using nodelocks and chipEV but it sounds so messy+not accurate so I don't know, maybe better to take a look at how the AIs (pluribus) performed against humans and use that as a max potential winrate.

Ashwaganda - I don't feel at all in a position to give medical advice but I will share my experience taking ashwaganda for about 40 days now. It seems to have had a massive impact on my low level anxiety, and maybe as a negative side effect dulled my emotions a lot.

I feel less impacted by negative events than before, I guess I also feel slightly less impact from positive triggers too, but it does feel like I can semi consciously control this. Or rather the change that I've felt is that emotions negative/positive don't burst up to the surface as much anymore.

I've also noticed an improvement in cognition and memory recently

I recommend it highly for poker players as I think the daily stress and extensive memory work can take a major toll on your brain health long term (I have previously experienced really bad memory issues from stress - forgetting big life events and blanking out whole days) - Here's a good video on side effects

the HU is 1k zoom and some 2k reg table

again most my volume ended up being 1k 2k

Also im on bit of an online heater atm (this includes winnings from couple of the previous graphs), countered by fact I lost 15k euro at 100/100 plo5 live on some soft game shortstacking (got it in ahead 2x, so behind ev)

HU NLH, HU PLO and MTTs

I've been considering learning/focusing on HU NLH+HU PLO recently and been trying out some HU NLH, I've also been learning about MTTs. I asked my ex coach opinion about formats and the future of online poker and his response was to focus on one thing only to get compounding effects, I think he's probably right but recently I've been struggling to pick just one format I enjoy/think is best long term.

It can be pretty exhausting to study multiple formats at once and be at completely different levels but I think the ROI studying formats you suck at is obviously way bigger+quicker, so it is possibly ok to study multiple formats until you're at least decently proficient at the ones you're interested in

Some of the HU NLH regs seem to be bit weak to be honest, and I've heard the same for some of the HU PLO regs, and it is a really fun format. I'm kind of punting at HU NLH but probably ran good

I've also been studying MTTs lately which has been surprisingly really fun, there's a lot of ideas I have about how pool could be misplaying common spots using some simple logic that I want to test out. But if I'm honest I need to fix my basics first here with 10-30bb chip EV preflop

I think one of the scariest parts of studying a new format is not being able to find out accurately what the rakes and possible winrates are. Especially on GG where there's preflop rake and you would need to find some random PLO5 reg to know what the rake is and if its beatable for example, or how likely it is to get colluded on etc.

I might make a blog post full of rakes for different formats and winrate possibilities some time (+thank you neo for the WPN HU rakes). Something I want to do is simulate X different poker players playing different formats with different BRM strategies and see which on avg nets the highest true EV BR given certain parameters (like standard deviation of their format, their winrate, volume, move up/down threshold)

I accidentally just flagged your comment hope that doesn't remove it -

I think the guy I was talking to POV was essentially that there's not enough data/the tech implementation isn't there yet to say that BTC will go up as people predict , or some big event happening to collapse the infrastructure. No reason to take such big gamble risks with no real edge, he'd prefer to make +EV plays that you know are +EV. I guess it makes sense, I'm still bit undecided on what I'll do

I've been reading a book recently called Denial of Death which has an interesting idea that everyone deep down has a fear of death strong enough that their day to day activities are an attempt to immortalise themselves or prove their worth in some way.

I realise that poker for many is a way to make themselves the hero of the story, get recognition etc, in a similar light people who work uniformed jobs are also heroes in their mind in another way (they think their noble day to day acts make them a humble hero)

I was playing some 20/50 cash at EPT Barcelona and realised that every person in that room thought they were the hero, and every ones ego is pretty big including mine lol

I met a guy who owns a private hedge fund that were competing with Alameda 3AC etc so big whale, talked to him a lot about markets and psychology and he had a interesting view point that he basically thought all the pros in that room were over estimating their edge and taking too much risk with not enough BIs BRM. From his experience of watching his competitors blow up from over risking, and from his experience of interviewing 100 speculative traders (to bring into his hedge fund) and not bringing on any because they all were unable to prove their winrate over a large enough sample (or used backtesting which is flawed in many ways, as it creates a backwards looking strategy)

I also like many poker players considered putting a large % of my networth into crypto over the next few months on the basis that when the FED pauses rate hikes there will be an influx of liquidity and pump - but his counter argument was that everyone is expecting that and there is no real edge if everyone is expecting it. The top hedge funds have ways to predict interest rate hikes and price these things in, there's also a large possibility that something goes wrong and you nuke half your net worth for no reason (Because crypto doesn't have a big enough history to warrant such over exposure, it could be that yes when X happens the last 3 times it goes up, but the 4th time it doesn't and you get mega rekt like 3AC). So he recommended just 5% crypto exposure and rest US equities because that compounded is millions and has more historical success.

Thanks for the insight IAmNeo =) I came to same conclusion as you more or less, thanks for the rake numbers alsoo
And Paul Gough thank you =) I wasn’t referring to a specific book there but some general book recommendations that I found useful were: Mastering your emotions, 6 pillars of self esteem and The second mountain: a quest for a moral life. Most recommend the last for introspection

Poker shots update

Had some swing at NL10k, started out early on in this blog with some sunrun at 10k made a stack or 2 in some non-interesting spots (AA flat 4b BUCO face triple), and just yesterday ran bad at 10k and lost 2stacks. Here is graph since around start of blog, not sure if I'm happy or not with how I've been playing need to review a bit but I have definitely felt a big shift in the way I think about the game and potentially growth, I think I might be in a transition phase to a new strategy that could work really well. ev bb 2.69 with quite a bit of regbattling is ok but samples whatever

Risk taking aggressive BRM vs lower risk bumhunt grind

I've recently been deliberating about what I wanted to grind going forward (shot or bumhunt); whether I should consider being staked for mental relief purposes for these low volume HS shots...
-There's enough volume at NL5k and NL2k to shift almost all my volume there if I try hard enough.
-I might have improved enough to eek out some winrate in regbattles with some new ideas I've been working on.
-I might potentially get staked for big live MTTs in the future like Triton which is probably a good opportunity.
-I'm also considering studying HU and playing some 2k/5k HU NLH vs regs but I need to find out about the rake and potential winrates.

Something I've heard Stefan say is that at some point he didn't plan to play at all higher than NL5k because it meant when he went back to his main NL5k grind he wouldn't be motivated enough so its better to play only 5k long term. I sort of understand his sentiment as it feels bit stupid to grind 2k-5k then play 1/10 volume at NL10k and that decides how your year goes. He also has apparently never been staked/sold action.

When I look back over the last couple years all the big swings in my BR were through the bigger risks I took (both up and down to be fair). So it is hard to say whether this higher risk BRM and aggressive shots has net me more than if I grinded NL500/NL1000 bumhunting, but I think it has helped me improve a lot and get accustomed with higher swings. Something that I need to figure out is how my net earnings is quite good in absolute USD but my networth doesn't seem to retain that much of it (I seem to burn a lot of money on random risks and expenditures even though I don't spend much on myself).

Lastly I think its better to get to play as high as possible to avoid cheaters because at HS people generally know each other and can figure out if someone is cheating, whereas at 1k there is more room for some unknown guy to RTA.

So in summary, though the swings have hurt a bit (40k up and down couple times in 2 weeks almost), it didn't hurt as much as much smaller amounts did 6months ago and I didn't fall into any destructive behaviour which I'm happy about. So I will continue to study and shot HS into the future and take some other opportunities along the way to play HS live.

Today I sat watching lobbies 2k-10k for an hour, not something I’ve done before just literally sitting there not doing anything else or regbattling a small table. With the lack of action I sometimes decide to not watch the lobby in my playing time slot and end up playing CS. In the end I was 1 second away from getting a super VIP 5k table, and ended up running hot in a mediocre 10k table. I heard a saying that's pretty fitting to the HS lifestyle

"An investors life is years of boredom punctuated by brief moments of terror"

Now that I’m beginning to see the peak of the mountain in terms of poker I wonder - What is really there? Was it worth it? What do I really want? I want to touch on some ideas that begin to answer these questions from a book I've been reading called 'The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life’

I likely fall into the ‘insecure overachiever’ category, someone who frantically attempts to achieve something usually in the realm of work to attain recognition/status by climbing their 'first mountain'. The driving forces are something like:

A) Modern societies individualistic nature (lack of the boomer “We’re in this together” mindset, the increased freedoms and lack of pressure to follow your parents footsteps, the lack of guidance once you get off the education escalator)

B) That's what society recognises/rewards and tells you to do (through social media, higher salaries, friends&families opinions of respectable jobs etc). Or "because this generation has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values".

Or because you haven’t taken time to truly discover your passions when money isn’t involved.

You can begin to see how there are many possible reasons for why one might accidentally spend years working in a corporate job they hate (or equivalent position of climbing the first mountain). I don't really know where I am on my first mountain or what I want to do going forward. But I hope to answer it by the end of this book, maybe it will involve learning something new and playing NL1k to increase consistency in volume/hours (to free up time). Or maybe it will involve relaxing on pushing the gas on poker and focus on something more innately rewarding (second mountain).

Something I'm very grateful for is the freedom that poker grants you, it allows you to develop your first and second mountain simultaneously because of the lack of bosses/fixed hours etc. You can take a month off to focus only on learning X/Y etc. Also how much effort you put into poker is more or less given back in equal reward so you can climb your first mountain pretty fast and not spend years after University in a state of acedia (Quieting of passion/lack of care. Living a life that doesn't arouse your strong passions and therefore instils a sluggishness of the soul).

Lastly to wrap back to the first paragraph about watching HS lobbies I also stumbled upon a few guys on GG who I think are weak regulars who have made upwards of 300k USD on mainly NL500/N1K … For comparison my results on EU public sites excluding zoom has been relatively breakeven regbattling, tho I’m fortunate to have some successful live trips and good results at NL1K. But I always thought that that easy/monotonous grind was a stepping stone which I wanted to jump over asap to play HS. Now I’m wondering should I just grind set hours like a job at NL1K ?

“Over the years, your ego has found a specific way it wants you to be
in order to win the most approval—what Henri Nouwen calls the “ego
ideal.” The ego wants you to point your life to the role that will
make you seem smart, good-looking, and admirable. It’s likely you have
spent a lot of time so far conforming to the ego ideal.”

I managed to get a deposit of 30k USD, I'm playing without affiliate rb and think 5k is beatable for sure yh just bumhunting hard though. 1k I haven't bothered to look at but I wouldn't waste time there unless I had little other site access to 1k games and wanted to grind high volume imo

UK is tough yh =( I wasn't on stars for like a year cus I had no deposit then I managed to get some on there through a live MTT cash (hoping to do same again at EPT barce)

Bit frustrated at the moment trying to figure out what time of day to play (maybe optimise for best GG/ACR time? idk) - I just played a short session on 2k where I most definitely got colluded on in 2x pots where I lost my stack. In one a reg pretends to be fish and coldcalls a 4b and another very sus 3way flop 3b backjam hand...

I've since read on 2+2 thread many other reports of suspected cheating and running massively under EV so now I'm bit lost for volume at 2k+. It's a big shame GG has no 2k tables

Had a sunrun day at 5k the other day where I made 35k usd and then last 2 nights I've lost 10k and 6k very quickly at 2k =( Maybe my reg battle ACR/Stars goal will have to comeback sooner than I thought - Also not had any interesting thoughts to write posts about atm.

(Site/app unnamed but its not GG/ACR/Stars)

Today I played quite a bad session (results wise was ok, hands played weren't too bad either) but it was terrible in that I could feel my brain was super clouded from not having much energy, and I was getting a bit annoyed that I couldn't focus. It was a session played outside my normal hours just because I felt like playing, some form of urgency was definitely there.

I did some introspection and realised that energy management is one of my worst skills, I routinely get into lazy eating habits (if fridge is empty I'll wait till I can coincide going to the shops with going to the gym and not eat for hours etc). One big problem is that I don't understand how humans gain energy.

So I started out by looking into what gives humans energy, I found some stuff that's pretty interesting for anyone else struggling (and framing it in a way where you realise its importance by knowing the why rather than just what to do)

"Wake up and get sunlight within 5minutes of the day" - Everyone hears this but I feel like few people actually do it. But the reason for doing it is something like:
Sunlight into your eyes -> Cortisol spike -> Energy for the day (and also helps you fall asleep better later at night I guess because your cortisol begins to drop earlier).
(Cloudy days are still fine, but 10minutes of exposure required. 5min on sunny days)
(It wouldn't let me post a link to the Andrew Huberman YT clip source)

"Drink water" - Why though? I hope to improve on this by understanding the why a bit, but apparently our bodies are pretty bad at noticing thirst and often mistake thirst for tiredness, when we usually feel thirst its already too late and we're dehydrated.

"Remove distractions" - Removing distractions, logging off discord, putting phone on silent or only sitting at your PC when you have a specific intention (deep work study on something you already decided to work on the day before or to play a session or to unwind through video games etc) . On average it takes 23 minutes to refocus completely after quickly checking your phone, that's basically your whole day gone.

I have a couple other things I will try doing but I don't think they're worth writing about, maybe I will look into+make a post about willpower (its importance and how to improve it)

A bit of a topic I don’t have the greatest knowledge on but thought I’d try understand better by writing here about is treating poker like an athlete.

There are some poker psychologists in the poker space/mental coaches who speak a lot about topics like identity, beliefs and other concepts that are quite theoretical - they are hard to grasp without some real dedicated conscious thought. It's quite easy to hear them say it, think yeah it is good but not really think about why or actually do it.

I’ve always kind of glossed over these ideas till I was forced to think it through in a longer form medium like a book where the questions are kind of asked for you.
But I want to try bridge the gap for a couple of these concepts that I think are quite hard to understand the importance of: Identity and beliefs (in relation to poker).

I feel it’s important to have a strong self identity that aligns with your future goals and a healthy life, Matt Marinelli in his podcast with Poker Ambition is a great example - His identity is built around being scientific, gritty, risk taking and hard working. That constant underlying self belief is vital to keeping yourself motivated long term and makes you actualise those qualities even if they weren’t true to begin with.

When I was 14-18 I really hadn't thought much about anything, I kind of realised around 19 that I hadn't truly had a thought about something in my life that's completely my own or properly thought out (was just stuck in dopamine/hedonistic cycles etc). I believe that identity and your beliefs are really strong tools for governing your life and want to write a bit about the why (not necessarily the how because there's plenty of resources on that from people far more knowledgable than me).

Option A) Don't spend any time on boring disclipined stuff like self reflection, journaling, meditating, mantras, "philosophical meditation" (where you ask yourself questions like what am I grateful for, what am I annoyed about and why etc) --> Get stuck in one form of addictive distraction in the modern world and stagnate for ages or don't achieve your goals (Instagram doom scrolling, brainless rakeback grinding etc)
Option B) Rather than divide your time something like 25% study/75% play, split it more like 40% play/20% self reflection/40% study - This way you're setup to make leaps ahead of the group

Lastly, something that helped me keep up good habits is creating an image of myself some time in the future if I do/don't do the things I need to do. For example each time you do something that negatively contributes to your future like the occasional blackjack hand, just take it to the extreme and think "What will happen if I did this 1000x, I would end up broke, lose my loved ones, homeless, hungry" Because its very easy to think that doing it once is not gonna hurt but you end up doing it once every month then once every week etc...
Or conversely create a positive image of the future for what will happen if you do that extra rep in the gym, how much it adds up over time.

If you want to read/hear more about some of these ideas I recommend checking out Adam from Poker Ambition, I like the things he focuses on a lot (he has a lot of free YouTube content that can get you started in the right directions)

Nice comment, i think you're spot on :)

Thank you for the great reply, I really enjoy having my opinions challenged which is why I started this blog :)

Firstly I agree a lot with your comment on putting in large sample with low WR at HS = long term success, I've sometimes looked at my samples zoomed in and thought damn I suck or I'm a god (but knowing its variance in small sample) until I zoom out and see that even a winrate of 2-3bb/100 is good $ over big enough hand sample.
I see HS regs who I know are really strong have terrible results on 1 site and great on another all the time too. It does seem that most HS regs have a winrate of sub 4bb/100 with the exceptions of literally a couple people who still could be said to be just sunrunning low volume

The point about how a network can weed out bad ideas and keep you consistent maybe I'm undervaluing but I feel like long term you're not going to have a bubble like that and its best to try get into a routine/mental state about the game (in terms of respecting variance, handling swings -> still putting in study when you're winning/grinding consistently for long time) and for me I find the only way to do that is to enjoy the game a lot and keep at it. I've never burnt out in 4 years and have taken close to 0days off even when I was sick (being a bit more conscious lately of taking low intensity conscious rest tho).

I find that the pros I've met over the years who fizzle out and quit all share two qualities: not enough volume and not enjoying the game, seeing it purely as a job. Even those that had worked actively in groups quit due to those reasons. Because with low volume eventually you run into a bad enough stretch to make you question things and quit, and without passion for the game your volume dips and it could end up being a whole half-full year wasted. (On the otherside I find most top regs find eventually that they have to keep a consistent routine healthwise outside of game, find a consistent sleep time, go gym regularly, meditate in some form/deep conscious rest etc as well)

Also your comment about how a team motivating you when things are going bad/hyping you when things are going well I accept, I realise now I'm quite fortunate to get that support from my partner. That support is really valuable for me especially in rough times (when I take shots at a higher stake that goes bad and my BR depleted she made me feel like an idiot for being a bit down about it because as I told her it's money I was conscious I could lose and it doesn't really affect my life at all - I might've quit a couple times in my worst downswings when life events happened simultaneously, so having support to keep you grinding long enough to see the fruits of your labour is definitely true)

I might consider the benefits of working in a team more though as my ex-coach does seem to be a bit of an anomaly in his opinion, I hear most top HS regs work in small teams (Linus+MBF, Nacho Davy etc)

Also that picture of expected results for different samples is really interesting thank you

"Studying with others is really good, that network is valuable etc" -every cfp ever:

I feel fairly strongly that it's a waste of time to study with someone else if you're capable of motivating yourself, there is some social benefits but generally its an unfair exchange of information and a lot of time is wasted trying to convey ideas or plan to call at X time etc

It's much more effective to work alone, its hard to do true deep work as a group

Also the most common form of group study is super ineffective (HH discussion), you're just taking the biases of other humans and trying to use that to justify something rather than getting deep into a solver and testing ideas and formulating logic/thought process/fundamentals

I only believe this because of my ex-coach had same opinion and I hold his opinion very highly and after some attempts at group study have come to same conclusion as him. (His coaching methodology was very academic was sharing data and solver findings for us to go away on work on our self)