Hey nice blog been following for a while.

Do you use the same name but FG at the start on Ipoker? think we played a few hands against each other im Silverelite on Ipoker. I play 4nl when i cant get on 10nl

Yeah thats me

unfortunatly another very bad session

2 hours, 892 hands and -43BB/100
This session I really cannot do anything... I played strong agressive poker and took lots of small pots down.

My All In Play was desastrous though... wins: QQ vs AK (on a KQ7 flop) 52BB KK vs AA preflop 88BB, losses: AQ vs A7o PF ( maniac) 88BB KK vs AQo 140 BB

within 2 sessions I lost now half of my profit... well does not matter... thats how poker works... obviously NL10 has to wait some time but I will get there eventually.

Hello ,
Try not to get affected by this bad run. Play your standard good poker and things will definitely get better. Are you using a HUD? I am asking this because I can't use such a thing on UNIBET, and I find it very difficult to play in the 3bet pots.
Good luck at the tables!

Evening session

2hours, 1068 hands, +6,76BB/100

so back to normal I guess.

From time to time I feel that some frustration is tickling me... 5th session in a row where I run severely below EV. Over all I am happy with this session.

I am not sure how to play my OESD atm... I feel so much more confident with a NFD... even 3barrelling works here quite fine... c/r or just raising... all in petto... well another topic i can work on

additionally I really have to dig into the BB again. -60BB/100 is just horrible... (EV adjusted -51) VPIP 29,3, 3bet 6,5... I obviously play tooo much fit/fold --> my W$WSD is around 50, only the BB is down at 37

@Balonas thx for stoppy by Yes I am usind a HUD. This helps me alot! ATM i do not want to play on a site where a hud is not allowed...

Probably need to be 3b more from BB. I am guilty of this as well as it is just so easy to call from the BB cuz you close the action. You are going to have range and nut disadvantage on alot of boards from the BB.

vBU and CO probably need to be bluff raising a lot more on certain board textures, especially vs BU. So many guys out there will be opening 40-50% range and just cbetting at will on the flop on certain textures. You already hit on it as well, you may not be defending enough on flop and turn and be fit or folding to much, so need to understand that your range in general is weaker and you need to call down a bit lighter sometimes, although it is 4nl, so not sure how much these guys are barrel bluffing. Anyway, there are certain board textures that you, as the BB, should be XR upwards of 20% and that is against a competent opponent who is betting and defending balanced ranges on a solver. If you arent doing this then you are just allowing the IP player to play perfectly. He can cebt a ton and doesn't have to worry about getting raised and he knows if you do raise you are on a nstrong hand or strong draw and if he has a weaker hand he can just fold.

JJ4r board is always one that I think illustrates this kind of well. It is a fairly static and dry board. So here is what a solver would cbet:




It is ~66% cbet frequency. Bets about 80-85% of its Jx, opting to check back some of the weaker ones for balance. Uses some of the OPs as slowplays, but then opts to cbet pretty much anything with any backdoor equity or overcards to the 4 at some frequency.

So here is the defense that solver comes up with vs this strategy:




Solver raises ~23% on this board from the BB. A ton of stuff really. Not saying you should play solver style at 4nl, but just to illustrate what a good strategy is against a competent opponent would look like

So if you have guys in a spot like this that would cbet 80%. You can just bluff raise a lot. There isn't much they can do. They cbet K7o here and you bluff raise. They are just gonna fold. You might get played back at some versus the crazies, but it works pretty good, I have experimented with it some.

@fawltyfelix

thank you so much... I had a longer review-session yesterday and wanted to implement what you said. What program are you using?

I defend too wide, 3bet too few and defend way too few from BB. My session today makes it impossible to analyze the improvements though...

I played close to two hours, so about 900 hands... and HM told me I played -130BB/100!!! WTF o.O!!! ... checking with my roll it was rather -2BB/100. HM was importing garbage, so i deleted the data as no results are useful.
One bluff missed terribly but other than that I played OK. Poker is sooo hard when the cards do not give you any action...

That program is Simple Postflop. My coach ran some solves for me on it. Solvers are pretty cool, but pretty pricey and need to make sure that you have a machine with enough RAM, etc to be able to do the solves. In a spot like that where stacks going to the flop are still basically 100bb you might need 20mb RAM to run the solve. Idk the exact amount but basically the deeper the stacks, the more bet sizes, the more options you give the decision tree the more computing power the solver needs.

I guess the cool thing about Simple is you can buy 100 "solve points" and basically set up the solve and then it uploads it to their servers and they do the solve for you and send it back. I think the 100 points costs like 80 bucks. If you want the full license to compute flops on your own I think its like 800 bucks. The other solver that I am familiar with is PioSolver. I think they have a level that is similar to the Simple license that only costs around 600 bucks. Not sure exactly as they have different levels. Then I think there is GTORB which is more web based I believe and there may be some others.

You can also do some of the calldowns manually. I have done quite a few of those. Basically just calculate what your minimum defense frequency would be based on a bet size you are facing, pick a flop and start choosing all the hands you "need" to defend so they can't auto profit cbet on you. You can then look at all those hands and start choosing hands you would want to raise out of those.

So basically if you are facing 1/3 bet on the flop you need to defend 75%, if it is 1/2 then it is 66% etc. MDF is just 100-bluff odds. So bluff odds would be if they are betting 1/2 using the risk/(risk + reward) would be: risk = 1/2 and reward=1( the existing pot size) .5/(1+.5). So basically it is .5/1.5 which is 33%. So essentially if you fold more than 33% of the time to 1/2 pot bet then they are auto profiting, so your MDF is 67% of your range. So you can put in your BB preflop cold call range, count the combos and multiple by the MDF and figure out how many combos you need to be defending to a 1/2 cbet. This doesn't really take into account range disadvantage unfortunately and using this you may actually be defending too much, but it is a start and a good exercise to start visualizing what your ranges look like on the flop, then moving to the turn, etc

Lastly, pretty much all of those solvers allow you to do turn and river solves for free. Can just download the program and then start putting in some ranges that you think you might get to various turns and rivers with and start seeing how the solver would play those spots. I think they are good and all but shouldn't get too bogged down with this balanced perfect play at the micros as most people you are playing against aren't playing anywhere near like what a solver would play. It gives you a good baseline as like a default strategy in a vacuum, that would make you money long term, but you would probably be leaving money on the table versus some opponent and may even be burning money in some spots by calling down what is "correct" in spots you don't need to because your opponent is just never gonna have the kind of betting range that a solver would

Afternoon session
100 minutes, 845 hands +46,33 BB/100

yes this was a nice session. after the last couple of days this is very appreciated. There were nearly no tricky calls on the river. I am just unhappy with 1 hand where I set the trap perfectly but missed about 30BB in value due to bad sizing. Other than that I did pretty good.

@fawltyfelix as always thanks for you post and in depth analysis. I downloaded PIOsolver yesterday and played around with the free version. This is some mighty tool, but 1k€ for the full package is a bit much for my taste I will think about this when I hit NL 50/100. There is much more work I can do on the basics atm.

As coaching is also rather on the expensive side (I want to start with coaching as soon as my earnings can somehow cover 2/3 lessons a month) I am really looking for an experienced study group and I am always open for suggestions

Afternoon session
100 minutes, 845 hands +46,33 BB/100

yes this was a nice session. after the last couple of days this is very appreciated. There were nearly no tricky calls on the river. I am just unhappy with 1 hand where I set the trap perfectly but missed about 30BB in value due to bad sizing. Other than that I did pretty good.

@fawltyfelix as always thanks for you post and in depth analysis. I downloaded PIOsolver yesterday and played around with the free version. This is some mighty tool, but 1k€ for the full package is a bit much for my taste I will think about this when I hit NL 50/100. There is much more work I can do on the basics atm.

As coaching is also rather on the expensive side (I want to start with coaching as soon as my earnings can somehow cover 2/3 lessons a month) I am really looking for an experienced study group and I am always open for suggestions

PIO is good, as long as you know how to use it! Pricey for sure and best used for the bigger stakes when playing to a more GTO approach

Flopzilla I would say is a must, the best study took I've found and affordable

you wouldn't need the 1k version anyhow. I mean being able to do preflop solves is cool and all, but you would need a pretty badass computer that has tons of cores and ram. All the guys I know have the pro version for 475. It also has 2 activation which most people think just means they can put it on 2 computers, which you can, but from what I have heard Pio will let 2 seperate people buy it and each person gets an activation, so if you and a friend want it just split it and each of you guys gets 1 activation. I have just never done it cuz I only have a laptop with 8mb of RAM. I will be able to solve 3bet and 4bet pots pretty easily but some of the later position single raised pot spots I wouldn't have enough RAM to do it so not worth it until I get a stronger desktop.

Flopzilla definitely good and then I have power equilab and pokerranger

aaaaaaand another nightmare session...

i stopped because i was tilting...

1 hour, 500 hands and -64BB/100

nearly lost all the profit from yesterday...

god this was frustrating... fellow fish called everything... hit everything... i hate those days...

Afternoon session

2 hours, close to 900 hands and +28,4BB/100

Red very stable, blue nice upwards sloping blue

I did not play the best of the best but I guess this is good enough to fight my way up to the higher stakes... I have several hands that i will post in the review section.

I started to play around with some analyzing tools... Flopzilla is nice but I have not seen what it can do what pokerrange not also does. Additionally I found the "Equity Trainer" on Pokerranger... WOW what a cool tool. It quizzes you about your equity you have against a given range and a bord. The board is always randomized. So I will include at least 30 minutes of equity training to my daily routine.

I also decided that it is time for another book. I read "the grinders manual" over and over for a couple of month now and I have surly not grasped every aspect of it, but it is time for something new. I will start reading "essential poker maths". You see I want to get a better understanding of the theoretical aspect of the game.

My dayli routine also includes hand-breakdowns by "splitsuit" there are lots of interesting videos on youtube. I will do at least 2.


I started my fitnesscenter career this week. Its about 70 minutes of muscle training and 40 minutes of cardio. 1 core session and 1 arms and legs session. always alternating. I will do this at least twice a week. Additionally I have at least every 2 weeks 2 hours of football. Maybe I can get a session of yoga alternating to my football games.
Training also makes me want to eat cleaner. Lots of improvement in this area necessary. I have a plan but have to look how this turns out.

Getting better at poker needs lots of discipline. I played around a bit for the first half of the year. Since i joined PokerVIP and also read your stories I managed improve not only my pokerskills (roll went from 100 to 350 in 3 months) but also got some more structure into my non-poker-life. Lets hope this liveupswing holds a looooong time

grmpf...

3 hours, 1300 hands, -22BB/100
after 200 hands down 1 buy in; after 600 hands down 2 buy ins; after 1200 hands 0; after 1300 down 3 buy ins... OK the last on i punted because i was tilting. I played good poker but after about 1000 villain hit it always... the most tight and timid players raised me again and again and again. I stayed disziplined until the last hand where Villain called my 3bet and called my 75% bet on the flop with a gutshot and got there... yeah I should have saved those 2 € ...

The last week in poker was terrible...

Evening session...

fun, frustrating, fun again but also frustrating

Bwin gave me some 1,1€ tournament tickets so I registered.
In order to not only just play 1 table I also played my twister-tickets at Betfair.

Twisters started very nice. I made a profit of about 12€ which is very nice. Even more so because they were free Frustrating because I lost a 10€ and a 4€ just because me and "all ins" are not working.

As the tourney went quite well I fired up some cash tables.

3 hours and 1200 hands later I was up about 10BB/100. I am a bit annoyed as i thought i played quite good but red plummeted into oblivion. This session could be waaaay better....

I played the tourney really really good. And of course the end had to come when my AA faced KK and got wrecked I finished 112 of 1000

I am very content with the volume I put in today. Tomorrow I plan to do 2000 hands, 2 hours of fitness center and some study... and.. äh 8 hours of regular work

Afternoon session
90 min , 660 hands -15,5BB/100...

after 200 hands I was up 150BB, what a session

and than i lost pot after pot after pot

ATM i really have mental issues... i lose it quite fast...
lets see if I can come back in the evening...

night session

1,5 hours 600 hands and +13BB/100

i am not happy with my poker at all... I lose my edge and red plummets down... problem is me calling to much and folding to much... argl

Now THAT is something you can work on and improve! Be methodical and don't let ego get in the way, just calculate it (offline or in the game) and move on imo

Yep like @Pwll says, you have identified it, so you can fix it!

I would have a look through your hands and filter for biggest pots lost where you've called on the river, assess those hands and see what you could have done differently and implement that when coming across the similar situations in the future.

Thanks for your replys guys...

sometimes i feel as if i forgot everything i learned....

afternoon looked exactly like all my last couple of sessions... solid poker, and suddenly i have a fatal error in my brain or something and my red crashes down.

1 hour, 400 hands and -21bb/100

I think I actually will stop focussing on technical issues and go more towards mental issues... I am not right in my head at the moment... maybe I even have to skip one or two days of poker... we will see how i feel