How to be a Poker player

Math, ranges, general tendencies (population reads) and frequencies , all this stuff makes you winning player. The key thing is of course that you play real people who on some limits adjust more on some less. There is no single strategy for any limit that just works 100% of time. Anybody who tries to teach that is just wrong. We can say that people don't 3 barrel bluff on NL50 ZOOM but then I can pull out from HHs dozen bluff catches that I made that worked. We can based on our experience + database analysis draw conclusions on how general population plays + take specific notes and get reads on regulars. This is how we in the end draw some sort of conclusions like don't 3 barrel bluff fish, don't 3 barrel in 3 bet pot vs calling station type reg, don't 4 bet light if you are not ready to call off 5 bet shove vs aggro wider etc.

I think you need to use system you mentioned which is learning poker right way in terms of math, ranges, board textures, profitability of betting and calling etc. On the other side if you do want to move up limits faster that is where tendencies and generalizations can help you. Stuff like people on NL25 ZOOM don't 4 bet bluff nearly enough or on NL50 ZOOM that people light bluff catch rivers but don't 3 barrel light. These things can help you adjust instantly (your expectations when facing those spots) and make correct decision using stats + history/notes if you have on player.

I am doing CG for 3 months now and I still consider myself a beginner. I think my strategy game plan call it whatever you want is profitable to beat now NL50 ZOOM. It doesn't even matter to me if it is with 1-2-4 or more bb/100. What I am concerned about is improving daily to the point where I am 100% sure in every hand vs every player type on different board textures and run outs what most +EV line would be. This will help me play way higher limits because as you go higher, opponents get better. There is still recreational players but regulars become better at fixing their leaks and at exploiting your leaks so this is why it becomes essential to understand adjusting and readjusting which brings me to my final point.
Playing limits up to NL100, you can use some "cheat sheet" in terms of tendencies that some coach teaches you and you can comfortably be profitable player by just listening to those advices. That does not however mean that you are GOOD ENOUGH POKER PLAYER. You are just good enough to learn and understand tendencies and therefore they help you win at those lower stakes. Once you get to NL100+ ZOOM people will adjust and readjust and if you don't understand concepts, range construction, post flop lines, profitability of different lines vs different players, different sizings on different board textures vs different opponents then chances are that you will not have a very high win rate or just be BEish to 2-3bb/100.
Having meet you in past couple of months, I am sure you don't wanna be the tendency but rather know it and understand it all type of guy. I am with you here and support your lines here. Just understand that learning tendencies for the limit you play is of great help to make money and enable you in the process of making money to study and actually improve your game as a whole.

Look forward to future graphs. Expect positive win rate in April from you on 50k+ sample!

Go Puppy

Thanks for your insight Ivica

I'm not saying that learning tendencies is bad, because it definitely is not and can help a lot in moving up the stakes. Especially if a player just starts to play poker. It just shouldn't be the primary focus if you want to become a great player. The are no dogmas in poker and with a decent enough understanding of poker, you don't need someone to tell you tendencies of specific stakes. You should be able to spot them just by playing couple of thousands hands and create you own adjustments to the field, before there is a video or something telling everybody what to do. Overall that's the kind of player I'm striving to be. Maybe it's much harder, but it feels like the right way.

There is tons of bad videos out there that are just teaching wrong things to players. Take everything you watch with a pinch of salt and trust coaches that are proven winners on large sample of games (with recent sample also!) and things that seem right coming from them.

Hands: 17,884
Won: +$266.04
Bankroll: $1353.67

It was a pretty nice week and I managed to grind a lot of hands. But I noticed that some leaks are still showing up in my game, despite the fact that I try to consciously work on them, which was kinda disappointing. Well, I guess I should work harder on those. Also because of all the grind I didn’t manage to put in the study hours, and I will try to improve on that aspect this week. I’m planning to do a lot of board analysis and range construction sessions, because at the moment this seems like a top priority for moving forward.

I feel a bit overwhelmed by the amount of study that need to be done, so taking a step back and working on one thing at the time seems like a good idea. On the other hand, working with different boards and thinking about your whole range on different run outs is a hell of a broad topic in itself, and should be broken down to smaller concepts, which I will try to do during next few weeks. It seems that the hardest part of being a poker player is finding a fine balance between studying and playing, and at the same time between poker and life, but in the end, if you love the game, the effort is totally worth it.

Puppy crushing it!!!

Hands: 6,021
Won: +$204.80
Rakeback: +$125
Bankroll: $1683.47

This week I worked a lot on the mental game and review some old Tommy Angelo stuff, which was very useful. I will try to implement some of his advices into my routine and see what comes of it.

On the other hand, speaking about counter-productive things, I got hooked on twitch poker streams and spent a lot of time railing those. I don’t care much about MTT’s that are getting streamed a lot, but when someone like George Danzer streams mixed-games or Jason Somerville spews in 5-card PLO learning as he goes, I just can’t stop watching. Maybe I should count this towards learning mixed-games, and then I wouldn’t be so upset afterwards about wasting time :f_biggrin:. Those streams are very informative after all.

Printing money past 2 weeks? Crushing mode on? NL200 by the end of the year puppy ?
Go puppy!

Hands: 6,865
Won: +$51.42
Bankroll: $1734.89

This week was kind of a disaster, because my computer died twice on me and I lost more than a half of the week trying to salvage some data and get everything running again. I also lost some HM data, so that’s why this week I don’t have a graph in my report. But I still managed to play some hands, which to my surprise was even a bit more than the last week. Taking into account how much time I lost this week, I wonder what I was doing last week given that I played even less.

And that brings me face to face to the main problem I have with my game right now: consistency. Sooner or later I want poker to become my main source of income, and it might be that it will happen sooner than I expected. So I really need to develop that professional attitude towards grinding and set all the necessary routines to maximize productivity. In the future I see myself as a full-time poker player, so I guess it is better to start sooner than later. It seems like a gamble at this point, but isn’t that the point of what we’re doing here?

Hands: 11,906
Won: +$171.36
Bankroll: $1906.25

This was a nice grinding week before a little poker hiatus, because I have to go to Paris for a week to attend a big sporting event. Most likely May will be brutal in terms of grinding and improving my poker game, so this might be a necessary break from poker before diving into it head first.

I feel like from now on poker will become an even bigger part of my life than it already is, which is a bit scary, but mostly exciting. I will miss my next weekly update, and hopefully after my return I will dedicate more time to updating my blog, posting some interesting poker-related stuff and so on.

Good luck at the tables!

Last week I took a break from poker and went to attend a major capoeira event in Paris. I’ve been doing capoeira for about 3 years now and it was an awesome opportunity to see and connect with a lot of capoeira masters from all around the world, as this event is the biggest held in Europe. Capoeira is a relatively young form of martial arts, and this event is the only opportunity to see the old capoeira legends in Europe, who truly made a revolution in capoeira and made it popular outside of Brazil. It was an amazing and inspirational week full of hard training and immersion in Brazilian culture, but now it is time to return to poker.

As I’ve said before, May, most likely, will be a very grind-heavy month, because I want to see how ready I am to make a step towards becoming a professional poker player, which without any doubts is a very hard endeavor. But I love poker enough to try this and see where it takes me. I missed poker a lot, so I better get back to the tables and play some hands.

I predict minimum 4bb/100 on 90k hands this month for You.
Go go go Puppy crush them all!

Originally posted by IvicaIliev77
There is tons of bad videos out there that are just teaching wrong things to players. Take everything you watch with a pinch of salt and trust coaches that are proven winners on large sample of games (with recent sample also!) and things that seem right coming from them.

+1!!! Most ppl. start to coach because they don't beat enough high stakes to live purely from poker anymore..... Sad but true. GL!

Hands: 7,750
Won: -$45.27
Bankroll: $1860.98

It was a bit rough return to the grind, but overall this week went nice and the long break from poker helped me find some areas in my game that I didn’t pay enough attention to and can improve significantly. It really helps to come back to the game with fresh mind without any accumulated emotions from the previous grind.

Apart from grinding I’ve spent a lot of time this week studying the theory behind the range construction, and in the near future I want to step away from predefined w34z3l’s ranges that I was using for quite a while and construct my own ranges using the theory and concepts that went into construction of w34z3l’s ranges. I want to try to construct an optimal set of ranges that fit my playing style and see how they should be altered vs different players and tendencies. It seems like a lot of work, but I like poker math and working with CREV, so it should be a nice way to learn a lot about poker and improve my game in the process.

True perfectionist you are my friend. Look forward to results of your work!

Success with that, I should do that too tbh but not sure where to start.

Originally posted by Anomic
Success with that, I should do that too tbh but not sure where to start.

Thanks, mate!

That's a very tedious work to be honest and involves a lot of calculations, but if you like this stuff, I feel that it can help improve your game a lot. There are some examples of what should be taken into consideration in Janda's book if I recall correctly.

I wonder how the best players adjust their preflop ranges to eachother and what they base their adjustments on.

For example: It's one thing to know what % of hands to defend minimum to a 4bet to prevent villain from autoprofiting but it's a very different beast to figure out which ones to call to the 4bet, which ones to shove and which ones to min5bet to maximize the EV of your whole range against a specific player.

+ Your whole preflop gameplan decides what range you will have at your disposal postflop on all the different possible board runouts

I've finished Janda's book and reading Tipton right now, I hope that will be enough to develop my own game from scratch

Yeah, that is a very interesting topic. I doubt that the edge of the best players comes from preflop play when they play against each other. I would assume that they have a very strong understanding of what ranges to play in different spot, for example taking into account table dynamics, positions of players at the tables etc, and apart from some experiments like Sauce’s limps from the BTN, the preflop game is something that is like a second nature to them, and the biggest part of the edge comes from postflop play. But that’s just my thoughts on the matter. By the way, I once heard Sauce talking about how he constructs his strategy not against an opponent’s range, but against a range of different strategies that his opponent might use, which seems so high-level and out of reach, but that’s what makes those guys the best.

Speaking about autoprofiting and MDF, those concepts are very basic and allow for a very rough range construction. The range of our opponent is still much more important to consider, along with other things. As far as I know, it is theoretically correct to give our opponent an opportunity to make an autoprofiting bet as long as he has a range advantage.

Also we have to consider our opponents range composition and his overall strategy to correctly construct our range. And that is exactly what helps us assign different hands to different ranges. While our preflop opening range will stay the same more or less, the tree of 3-4-5 betting game will deviate a lot. We would have different ranges and strategy against merged and polarized 3-bets or 4-bets. And also if our opponent 3-bets, then our 4-betting strategy will take into account his response to our 4-bet. If an opponent has a 5-betting or folding strategy, it makes sense to 4-bet bluff with blockers with a smaller sizing, but if he has a 3-bet/calling range, we might deliberately put hands like AQ into our 4-betting range, which otherwise would be in our calling range vs a 3-bet, and our bluffs will not only have blockers but also a good playability, since we expect to get called a bunch. That’s what I meant by “set” of ranges. But of course those are only basic things, and there are many theoretical considerations in range construction.

Janda’s book is excellent for this stuff, and I’ve heard only good reviews about Tipton’s books, so I hope those will help you out a lot.

Keep going Puppy you got it

Hands: 13.095
Won: +$259.25
Rakeback: +$75
Total: +$334.25
Bankroll: $2195.23

This week I managed to grind a bit more than usual, but I’m still not overly satisfied with the grinding volume. But on the other hand, increasing the volume strongly impacts the studying hours, so in the end I’m again struggling to find a good balance between both.

At the end of the week I found some leaks that I thought shouldn’t have been there. But they are, and it shows that there are many areas in my game that require constant attention, otherwise they start to slip. Of course in some areas I’m maybe too harsh on myself and expect them to be perfect, while there is no such thing in poker. Therefore, some inaccurate expectations may lead to frustration, which poker gives us plenty of regardless, and there is no need to create more by ourselves. So I think that the best course of action is to continue working on my game not sweating stats and frequencies too much, and enjoy the journey. Poker is a very fluid game and shouldn’t be constrained in rigid boundaries. In poker only variance is certain.