[BR CHALLENGE] Grinding it up in 2022 - now on 5NL [BR GOAL REACHED!]

Hey Insonoro!

Nice looking graphs and I like your general approach, so I think if you keep up you will see the desired results eventually!

I can't really answer all your questions with 100% accuracy, but I have a few thoughts I want to share with you.

Rake is really important, you need to beat your opponents AND the rake to be a winning player, so basically yes, it does influence your bb/100. What you can do against it, is to avoid marginal situations. For example when you have a flip, you need more than 51% equity to have profit, can't tell the exact numbers as I don't know how big the rake cap is, but generally you need 50% + the amount of rake of the pot in % or something like that (I'm not a CG player, maybe others can give more accurate calculations on this topic) to have a break even situation.

In my opinion when you compare your results to players outside of Italy, it's misleading. Most CG players put a great effort in table selection, and it's not the same to pick a table out of 10+ active tables, or just play the tables that are available for you. For this, I would suggest to include a table or two from one limit higher when your bankroll let you do so, trying to pick those that seems most profitable for you. But again, I don't know the player pool in those sites, and I'm not a CG player, so it's just my opinion. But I know for a fact how important table selection can be, so don't compare your results to players who can access a much bigger player pool (and assumably more recs/fishes to play against).

To decide whether you should play more tight or loose, while rake is something to consider here, the most important is to choose your playstyle according to your opponents. I've started playing on 888 recently after playing on Pokerstars for while, and the player pool is so different I had the same ROI with more or less the same strategy and stats, unfortunately with a "-" sign before it. I had to adopt to my new opponents. (It's important to note tho I play SnGs and the blind structures also had a great impact on this.)

And a last thing I think worth mentioning is volume. I find 888's software much slower than for example the software of Pokerstars, so with the same tight strategy your hourly rate will most likely smaller compared to other sites (less hand/hour). Another factor here is that recreational players want to have action, they usually play on only one table, and get bored more easily, so they play much looser to have their daily dose of action. I can't tell how exactly this should affect your strategy, but I think it's something to consider when you make your decisions at the tables.

I can't stress enough that these are my opinions, so please take them as such, but I really hope I could point out some factors to think about and you can profit from these.

Good luck at the tables!

Thank you Tamaseger for sharing your thoughts!

Yeah, avoiding marginal situations I guess is part of a tighter approach more in general. Unfortunately on Pokerstars it's not allowed to do table selecting; this, combined with the absence of rakeback deals available for the room, makes it a place probably hosting a softer field, I think.
I know many regs play on ipoker and people's sites because of the different deals available there, but this doesn't obviously make for a total absence of regs on PS at all. But still, as I speak, there are only 70 players at NL2 tables and 50 at ZOOM ones (Sunday afternoon). So the field is small. And I think this isn't good news in general.

Some years ago, Italy pulled out from a EU agreement between a few countries that aimed at creating a shared pool for the online poker market. It's crazy because the idea started in our very country but then Italian politicians changed their mind and put the thing off, excluding Italy from the agreement. Spain, France and another country now benefit from a shared player pool while Italians can only play with Italians... We don't know when this will change.

I guess these details do make a difference, so it's really hard to understand where I'm at and the exact adjustments to make, because as you rightfully say, results comparisons with other players - especially when it comes to educational material out there - could be misleading.

I'll keep playing and studying. I think I'll also keep playing ZOOM in a mixed sort of fashion with regular tables and see where this takes me.

I think overall I'll try to play below 20 VPIP and 17 PFR (still keeping LP play a bit looser) and see what will change and if the changes are positive (I started the year playing around 27/23).

Just one last thing from my side:
you are focussing now on the best hourly as far as i get. You will have to admit that this is not an hourly you would ever work for.
So rather treat the time in poker as a study time to be made as efficient as possible.
Basically what I am trying to tell you that maybe long term goals mean you should sacrifice your short term success. But: YOU need to decide and I think you made a reasonable decission!

Originally posted by insonoro
The results are incredible. So the hourly profit shows what seems to be a big difference: I make 1bb/hour playing reg tables, but almost 10bb/hour playing ZOOM, even though the win rate is 1.86 at ZOOM tables, around three times lower than what I make in regular tables.

Hello insoro!

The results are interesting comparing your winnings on reg tables and Zoom.

Don't you think PT4 made a mistake calculating your hourly winnings? According to your picture you made €0,02 in an hour, while your winrate was 5,81bb/100. After a quick calculation this means you played 17,21 hands/hour. If you play only one reg table, it would be 3-4 times more hands.

That's interesting, maybe I should ask PT4 support. I ran the query again, this time using BB/H and not the currency stat.
Results are different. Also I need to consider that I seem to be in the middle of quite a big downswing happening at ZOOM tables.

BB/Hour regular tables in the last 112k hands: 3.89bb/hour

BB/Hour regular tables in the last 150k hands: 5.58bb/hour

So yeah, ZOOM is still higher.

To make things equal in terms of the number of hands played, I filtered out the last 40k hands - the result is 12.30

bb/hour

Originally posted by SvenBe
Just one last thing from my side:
you are focussing now on the best hourly as far as i get. You will have to admit that this is not an hourly you would ever work for.
So rather treat the time in poker as a study time to be made as efficient as possible.
Basically what I am trying to tell you that maybe long term goals mean you should sacrifice your short term success. But: YOU need to decide and I think you made a reasonable decission!

Absolutely: I'm not doing this for a few cents per hour, but 1) because I like playing 2) because I like studying the game 3) also for the future potential - though I'm not super confident lol

Thank you for you advice, but I'm not sure what you mean by sacrificing the short term success: you mean sacrificing ZOOM because it gives me more per hour?

I find that ZOOM, if anything, makes it a little easier to study situations because of its speed and the advantage is also that it leaves you more time to focus on spots. 4 ZOOM tables equal about 16 regular tables in terms of hands/hour but I think my game would be disastrous 16tabling, while I feel like I can keep things together well on 4 ZOOM tables.

The competition though seems to differ quite much, showing a lower number of regs at regular tables, which is probably also the reason why I have a higher winrate there.

Yeah I was trying to recommend to not play zoom because in my eye it is easier to get reads and play concentrated on regular tables.

BANKROLL (including bonuses and rakeback): €156,87

It's been a rough month so far.

This month it's only +€3.82 with a winrate of 1.07bb/100 in total.

ZOOM tables:
2.5k hands
-€8.58

REGULAR tables:
15.2k hands
+€12.40 (4.07bb/100)

This makes me want to not play zoom anymore

But it's a small sample.

Anyway, I could not play at all for 5 days because I was on a trip, and I will be on another trip next week so I hope I can still at least hit the 30k hands per month target but it'll be hard.

BANKROLL (including bonuses and rakeback): €213.62€

Finally I see some light this month, after very dull and flat 25k hands, I hit a nice upswing.

By chance, I found a "rake in bb/100" PT4 stat in a forgotten folder on my Google Drive. So I imported it and I can now see how much rake I seem to be paying every 100bb. It is an interesting piece of data.

Plus, I'm logging all of the PokerStars.it promo money back that I'm getting. Pokerstars has no RB deal but the money that I got back in a variety of forms seems to be a good quantity. I logged the different categories of prizes and highlighted them in different colors. It turns out the %s of money back not bad at all. It's also worth considering that Pokerstars offers a better rake structure (5.5% versus 6.5+% on other sites).

So in July, for example, the total amount of awards I got represented over 57% of the rake paid. That's VERY good to me. In the table there's a "Rakeback" category because these days Pokerstars is offering a 40% rakeback promo if you play a certain amount of hands to hit a specified amount of rake (if you generate 25€ in rake, they give you 10€ back in the form of rakeback). But even if we do not consider that promo:

That's still 27% cashback.

On Pokerstars, the stats say that the rake is generally a little below 7bb/100

While on ipoker and 888 combined, the difference is just huge

888 is very soft in Italy but also a desert, with very few players. And I only have a 15% rb deal on it. ipoker is a bit tricky for me because I play on a Mac and it's not supported by PT4 so I play with no stats. But I still play on it because I have a 39% RB deal. On 888 I actually ran very well so the results are probably not representative. But I guess the rake value is.

Hi all!

BANKROLL is now 260€[/b] and I have leveled up to NL5

So we're at a +€220 since I started in mid May.

The first feeling is that I don't notice many differences from NL2. The only thing I'm doing differently is maybe a little more table selection. But other than that, everything seems okay.

I've been away on a trip in the mountains for almost a week and wasn't able to play at all so I'm a bit behind with the hands. This is the graph for August so far.

I'm not playing ZOOM right now as I never see ZOOM tables available for NL5 on PokerstarsIT.
I'm mixing in some playing on 888.it and ipoker. On 888 I was lucky and won €19.62 in a freeroll, and another €4 in another one. I still have to unlock that money though. But I hope I'll make it so I can keep it.

Trip to the mountains in August - in Italy? Isn't that a bit on the hot side?
Congratz on the freeroll and the positive EV!