BR Challenge $300 -> $1500

GL in your challenge
I will be very curious to see how you describe the difference in gameplay on the different rooms!

CU,SvenBe

Sounds like a solid plan! Good luck with the challenge! ♠_biggrin:

Hello kr1s1un,

Nice start to your blog and I look forward to reading future posts and good luck in reaching your goals

Subbed

Regards

Matt

good luck with your challenge!

Week 1

hands played: 9589
profit: -$17.13
BR: $286.06

Challenge Progress

Not much to say, I didn't check cashier through the week, and it helped me to focus on decisions not the results :), I think I got around $20 this week from rakeback, also I expect to get some extra cash from party $100K Cash Game Card Rush promo. For those who are curious I can show you my graph from this week:

The hardest thing is learning for me, I watched few videos this week, but there is so much to learn, and applying new things in my game takes time, I think good strategy will be to make notes while watching coaching videos, which I wasn't doing because I was too lazy xD. Today is Sunday, so I will go through the HM2, check opponents, and maybe post the most crazy hands on the forum. I'm also planning to read some poker mindset stuff.

The plan for the next week is to stick to the plan ;), I think I played more time than I spend for learning so I need to work on that.

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@SvenBe you asked how I see the difference in game play on different sites, so I can do a quick comparison. In past I used to play speed poker NL10/NL20 on William Hill Ipoker network, also I have small experience with 888 snap, so let's talk about it.

Software:
Pokerstars - so far the best software, best looking, no issues with HM2. Note making and color coding in software are very good.

PartyPoker - party poker is pretty good alternative, you can customize the look with PartyCaption, or 3rd party themes. Sometimes it's little laggy, and last time there were some issues with HM2 after party did update, usually after they do update you need to wait for HM2 staff to release an HM2 update. So this can be annoying. There is no color coding, you can make notes, but it's not efficient for me. The replayer is laggy, and if you want to see what hand villain had you need to go to HM2 because they won't show you in their replayer.

William Hill (Ipoker) - nice looking software, but there are serious issues with HM2, HUD isn't working when you play more than 1 speed table, HUD is jumping, weird things happen. Color coding works fine, I think I had some issues with note making. Overall the best software for notemaking is HM2.

888 - The HUD isn't working on snap! It was hard to switch from PS to 888, 888 software works good, but looks ugly. for me it's little confusing to navigate through their menus. I think you need to click a lot to make a note or color code.

Player Pool on NL10 ZOOM/FF/SPEED/SNAP:
Pokerstars: morning 300-400 evening 700-800, it's huge and this can be a problem, because if there are so many players you need to play a lot to gather some stats and make use of them, or you can find some friends and exchange database with them but I think that's illegal. I think this player pool is somewhat agressive compared to others. Because of cardmatch promo, they can 3B with any two high cards, and if you don't have stats this can be a problem, possible solution is to check the player's country or how many tables he play and try to make basic assumptions. Other solution is to play morning session :). I think notemaking is crucial to success in this playerpool.

Party Poker: mornings sometimes can be dead, sometimes there are only 15-30 players, evenings 70-120, the best hour to print money is 11PM CET, this player pool is pretty passive/ nitty and you can build up quickly database, so for me it's the best place to play right now.

William Hill: NL10 is pretty much dead the most players are on Nl5 and NL20, but if they make promotion or mission that require NL10 to accomplish this can playerpool is from my experience the most profitable, they are very passive. In my last 10k hands on WH I had 15BB/100, maybe not a big sample but you can make money here for sure.

888: TBH I don't have big experience here with NL10 players, so I won't tell you. :).

Promotions
Pokerstars: cardmatch is pretty sweet, because it attracts fishes to cash tables, and its always nice to get extra rage dollar
Party Poker: very nice promotions/bonuses, right now they have The $100KCashGameCardRush and I'm in top 30 so expect to get extra $75-100 cash today from this promo.
William Hill: I don't now the current status, but in last months they had some easy missions like win a hand with QQ on NL10 to qualify to 1000 euro shootout, and I've won from one shootout 100 euro, so it was good.
888 Poker: for me the the worst promos, they give you tickets to tournaments you can't find, I think I never get from them cash directly.

Rake?
I did some calculations in January, not many hands but you get the idea:

Rakeback?
I think I have the best rakeback deal on PP, on Pokerstars starcoins are cool, on WH it's pretty hard to get rakeback, on 888 idk.

I hope you guys are not bored, anyways wish me good luck with the challange ;).

Week 2

hands played: 5610
profit: $204.59
BR: $490.65

Challenge Progress

Pokerstars: $220.10
PartyPoker: $270.55

Good/Bad week, from $ perspective very good, check out how much I've made only from promotions!

• $100 from taking high place in Party Poker $100KCashGameCardRush
  
  Spoiler

  

• $25 from completing party poker mission in software
• $2 I've completed other mission and won 5 x $1.1 sit and go tickets, then I tried to played them but I only cashed 1 out of 5.
• $10 from starcoins
• $1 cardmatch
• $10 from party poker bonus, I've made party account in the end of december, and I have bonus that is giving me 25% more rakeback, bad thing is that this is valid only till the end of April, but I hope to get few bucks more from it.
  
  Spoiler

  

I didn't had mental power this week to play, but yesterday I had more time and I was running well, made $46.40 from single session (2k hands). This is graph from whole week.

Malfunctioning Mind

Sometimes I make notes after the session, and I've noticed that my mind goes blank in big pots, it's like when it's 3B pot, and there is like 100BB already in the pot, some shit happens, and I make bad moves. Luckily I've been reading Mental Game of Poker and I find out the cause of it.

Anyways wish me good luck and see you next time.

Week 3

hands played: 8953
profit: -$50.59
BR: $440.06

Challenge Progress

Pokerstars: $145.64
PartyPoker: $294.42

$ from bonuses:

Graph:

You know there is a new promotion on Pokerstars, when you need to win with Ax? When they put out new promo, there are always some gameplan changes, in this case I think players becomes more calling station postflop, many players started to calling any Ax preflop, and some regs started to cold calling AK,AQ. I wasn't pretty much prepared for that from the beginning.

This resulted in some bad plays from my side -> bad plays resulted in some form of tilt, therefore I knew I was doing something wrong so I had to make some adjustments. I always ask myself how much stacks will it take for me to learn the basics! Other thing is like I said before NL10 zoom has big playerpool and its pretty hard to get many hands on them, but if they are mostly calling station because of that promo then when I have something then I should bet big or even overbet, and ofc no bluffs without reads, but you probably already know that ♦. I also watched some videos about how to play against specific player types, so I'm pretty much happy with my learning process, and this resulted in my graph going up at the end of the week and I think I better understand my opponents.

I also noticed that I have some fear based problems, if the things go wrong (example: lost 5 buyins in single session) I want to play more (revenge tilt?), if the things goes well (won 5 buyins) my motivation for playing drops. This shouldn't make any diferrence, I need to work on that so I will push myself to continue reading Mental Game of Poker.

Thanks for reading and wish me good luck next week

Biggest win:

Biggest lost

Hope you have a better week 4 dude

Happy Easter!

Week 4

hands played: 9185
profit: -$69.53
BR: $370.53

Challenge Progress

That week wasn't so good, but showed me things that I need to work on, which I think are more on the mental side. For example, because of Easter I went for a party with friends, and because they called the same day, I decided to play my poker session sooner than usual, and I had to play this because I was participating in party poker promotion. I'm not used to playing in the middle of the day so that resulted in bad plays because I was thinking about hot girls instead of playing poker. Next thing is that we were drinking so the day after I was feeling bad, but I had to play because of that promo on party poker. Also I had one day when I was too tired from the job, and I should let it go and not play. Overall I won like $20 from party poker promo, and lost way more because playing when tired/sick/rushed.

So I also plan to expand my warm up sequence, I will start from asking myself simple questions: am I feeling good? am I ready to play? what are my goals? you know very basic things, and ffs I will not play if I feel bad / or in bad mood. Beside of many others standard warm up things that I'm doing I will also start from playing 20 min on 1 table for warmup. Wish me good luck next week

Redline looks pretty good this week, don't you think?

Week 5

hands played: 4507
profit: +$46.17 (including starcoins and other shit)
BR: $416.70

Challenge Progress

I've applied my plan to not to play when 100% ready, and I'm pretty happy about results. If you start fresh and you play A game from beginning then if something bad happen then its less likely that you will tilt. I use this (link) before session and I think its quite good. Glass of water before session also helps to focus better.

Also I want to mention that last week I've discovered that human is not design to multitask and multitasking cause brain damage.

Other thing is that I saw an ad on facebook about gamer's nutrition, maybe it's worth a try https://cfxnutrition.com/?lang=en I'm not doing any sports, so I need to compensate that with something lol.

See you next week :).

Week 6

hands played: 4046
profit: -$10.32 (+~$3 from cardmatch?)
BR: $406.38

I don't know how its possible but HM2 shows that I actually won something
EDIT: I had filters set wrong.

The reason because this week was so fv3k3d up is this:

Week 7

hands played: 4921
loss: -$40.88
BR: $365.5

Week 8

hands played: 6185
profit: +$123.60
BR: $489.10

Hello boys and girls, last two weeks was hard, pokerstars had no mercy for me, look for yourself:

but on the other side party poker loves me:

If it comes to my game development I spend some time reviewing my database and I found out that I'm cold calling too much, from all positions, so I reworked my whole preflop gameplay based on last ~50k hands. It is a leak that is hard to spot because I was losing many small pots and that accumulated you know what I mean. Anyways I hope to see results of my work soon!

Another thing is that I was playing only pokerstars last two weeks, the reason for this is that I want to learn to crush zoom, party poker NL10 fast forward compared to zoom is pretty easy. But now when party poker offers new rakeback system its kinda attractive to me to play back there... we will see, wish me good luck.

Week 9

hands played: 7013
profit: +$51.54
BR: $540.64

Week 10

hands played: 4950
profit: +$36.52
BR: $577.16

Week 11

hands played: 1875
profit: +$12.56
BR: $589.72

Sorry guys for not writing anything, but tbh there is not much to say. I discovered that on audiable.com you can get free trial and get 2 audiobooks for free, so ofc I use it to get mental game of poker 1&2, which helped me a lot!!!. I think reading these books are crucial to success because mindset has huge impact on the game and you get blueprint on how to work with your game. Aside from that, last time I didn't had much time to spend on poker because I want to change my regular job, to get nicer apartment so playing poker will be more comfortable. From my current perspective I see that success in poker can be achieved easily, you just need to 2 things : that mindset stuff that I've mentioned, and grind. Just by doing database review and checking PFR ranges/ opening ranges / 3b ranges you can adjust to the current stakes and room, but you need to grind a lot to get nice hands sample. thanks for reading, see you next time