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Chris's (long-term) vision
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Chris's (long-term) vision
This seems a fine place for a beginning.
Hi, I’m Chris. I’m on the last couple years of getting my doctorate and finding myself entirely unenthusiastic about the careers I will likely land in afterwards. Forging a small slice of financial independence for myself appeals to me the most. So it’s time to turn back to poker and give it another shot. Even though the games are slim in the US, they have recovered somewhat since Black Friday and as long as I can learn enough I can move to where the games are.
I began playing poker during the first poker explosion in the early 2000’s. Built up a BR, loved the feeling of having some money, then blew the whole thing taking shots with atrocious BR management. Eventually tried returning to the game, turned $50 into ~$1250 in the micros (hold’em SNGs/tourneys) and then BAM Black Friday. I could never find an online poker experience in the US after that which I found satisfactory having been used to rapidly firing 45-man and 180-man games. Finally back for a round 3 with a game that seems more energetic then NLH.
I intend to craft a robust vision here, but it’s probably best to start small. So only the poker side for now!
Vision: “I am a winning mid-high stakes player that plays part-time on evenings and weekends. I occasionally travel to play in large events/tournaments for the experience of it and to challenge myself against better players.”
Purpose: “I play poker because it facilitates my financial independence and flexible lifestyle. I love studying strategy, playing games, pushing myself to do more, and meeting cool people. Poker accomplishes all of this. Consistent work on my game keeps me working to not just be the best poker player I can be, but to improve all areas of my life as they all influence my poker success.”
Milestones:
* find my love for the game again
* play 5 sessions in a week
* build BR to $1000 so I can comfortably play $10 plo and shot-take at $25 plo.
* travel to play in a live tournament
* comfortably 4-table
* beat $100 plo for a reasonably high winrate (don’t know what that is exactly…8bb/100?) over a significant sample size
* use poker winnings to pay for something significant
* win a plo MTT
* play on Pokerstars for real money again
* play 100000 hands (this is a lot for me!)
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10 Replies
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Good luck man.
In what domain is your doctorate?
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Physics. It’s sad to find out the state of research when you get into it :/
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First day of trying to work into a schedule. My habits and priorities are significantly out-of-whack right now, so just trying to be consistent even if not putting in the amount of work I ultimately want to.
Since my plo game is so fresh and I have very few hands played (screwed around for a session a couple weeks ago and got ~150 hands) I designed a study session around the PLO trainer. Aiming to start by building solid fundamentals thus I focused on button RFI. So many hands in plo trying to get a grasp of my full button range in a single session turns out to be FAR too optimistic. Ended up studying 18 strong buckets (all ds ones). Making progress!
Learned some very interesting things. Especially the value of nuttiness and draws. Several hands would go from ~100% fold to ~100% raise by just swapping some suits or shifting a middle card by one. Most surprising was that the shift in card value would often be down! I’d see this most where a hand with something like 62 would fold but when it was 52 it was a raise. I’ve understood this as the 52 has a nut straight draw while 62 doesn’t, and the flush/high-card value of each one is essentially zero. Interesting stuff!
Now to keep doing something every day.
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Couple more days of study in the books. I am being terribly inefficient I suspect. At the moment I’m laser focusing on pre-flop ranges and essentially building them from scratch with the plo trainer. 3 days and still not even done with all the BTN RFI stuff 😀
That said, I have very few hands played so it’s not easy to prepare shorter, more focused sessions. I think as a beginning this kind of robust range building is probably a good thing…just feels so slow. I’ll start playing short sessions next week or so just to cement this stuff beyond the trainer quizzes.
I have found some more interesting spots that I don’t understand too. I admit that here I’m a bit frustrated because I have no one to easily bounce the questions off. The discord is where I turn, but the activity there is a bit underwhelming. I’m going to note them here for posterity and so I can edit the reasoning in should I ever figure it out.
BTN RFI comparisons
1: Ai8j6k2i is 65% whereas for Ai8j5k2i is 95%
2: Ti8j7k5i has lower ev (0.01) than Ti8j6k5i (0.04)
These are both similar issues that confuse me. In each case the hand I would guess is “worse” raises more/has higher value. Shifting the 6->5 or the 7->6 seem like they don’t add much in the way of additional smoothness or nuttiness so why do the hands become stronger/more playable?
Anyway…just gotta keep plugging away at it.
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I’ve been doing well with following a disciplined course of study. Put in some time every day since my last update. No hurry, no pause.
Last night I played a short session to try and help internalize the things I’ve been learning and it went okay. The session was a losing one, but not terribly surprising given the low-volume nature of the sessions I can play right now.
Some takeaways:
* Currently playing almost every aspect of plo by instinct. Best mental reference I have is NLHE. So not ideal in terms of playing a game that is likely to bring me profit.
* micro-stakes are very different from GTO.
* being limited to just ACR it will be very hard to get consistent volume at the true micros. It seems that there is no ‘zoom’ analog on ACR either. During the session yesterday there were no tables going for plo2 or plo5, so I had to play plo10 just to even have a seat (my BR is ~$100, so not the right stake). There are quite a few plo25 games running though. So I will have to adjust my milestones to account for this and probably use external cash to fund play at plo10.
All that said, I decided to take a different approach to study today. Instead of focusing on purely breaking down GTO RFI ranges and using the plo transformations course, I jumped into the crushing small stakes course. I need a more complete strategy for the plo streets than the half-a-pre-flop strategy I’m currently working with. Accounting for the big differences in things like fold equity, number of players/pot, and rake will also be helpful to have a guide for.
So, my current plan involves going over the CSS course and beginning to play more consistently. Still building the backbone of a gameplan, so not too rushed for play hours…but soon.
Now to keep working at it every day!
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Hey Chris,
Apologies that I am just getting to your progress log now, it slipped by me first time round.
Oh how I miss playing 180 mans times were much simpler back then, have no idea what you’re doing but still just print money, good times haha
Best of luck with all your goals and I look forward to following along, in terms of sites to play on outside of ACR have you checked out BetOnline? I would recommend speaking to @tomsmeets regarding this as it seems problematic if you’re having to play PLO10 all the time with a 10 buy in bankroll and will likely put you in a difficult position to progress as naturally you’ll need to run pretty hot with such few buy ins.
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You’re getting me nostalgic for the old days! Appreciate the consideration. I’ll see what tom has to say. My BR is not limited to $100 persay, I’m willing and able to deposit more I just haven’t done so yet.
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Hey Chris, in which State are you if I may ask since you’re saying being limited to ACR? I think finding more games for the stake level you like to play at the moment is important. I can help you with that.
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I’m in Hawaii right now. Have only checked out ACR for now though, haven’t messed with BetOnline.
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Been a bit since an update. Been a slower week for studying. Just more going on with life. Still able to get in at least one video a day, so that’s something.
I spoke to JNandez on discord last week. That was cool and unexpected! Shows a solid level of involvement in the site and material from the people creating it, which is excellent. He had some good suggestions, such as focus a bit more on post-flop. He suggested some material and I am currently running through the launchpad series before focusing more on either the crushing small stakes series or the transformation series. I intend to start playing more regularly once I’ve gone through the launchpad stuff as well. Just been a weird set of days.
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