I'm a 24 years old computer science student from Sweden. I love strategy games and I've been among Europe's best in both StarCraft I & II and I'm pretty good at DotA too.
I originally started playing poker back in 2011. I began with $50 at Full Tillt and miraculously decided to cash out and move to Pokerstars one week before Black Friday. It was a small roll, but I would probably have quit if I had lost it.
After about a month I found Hu SNGs and started winning for the first time. I used to study poker about three times as much as I played it, and I only one tabled so my volume always sucked badly - but I had a really nice ROI.
I played for roughly 6 months before I started university and quit to focus on my studies. However, I ended up playing mostly DotA instead. I kinda regret quitting since I was beating the $30 turbos really hard and probably could have made quite a lot of money if I had kept playing.
Now its time for a comeback, this time at the hypers since it seems like that's where the action is.
I've played for 2 weeks now. As can be seen my graph, I initially had quite a rough time. It wasn't a bad beat, I just played badly. I had an idea of how I used to play but I had forgotten most of the details. And its the details that make you profitable.
EDIT: Appears that the showdown/non-showdown line behave in a wierd way if you're filtering for real $ so here's a new one with chips.
The $3.5s were pretty easy to beat, but at the $7s the fish are much more aggressive. Not good aggressive, spewy aggressive, but I didn't adjust accordingly and initially had a hard time with them when the stacks were ~8-14bb deep. I had to do a lot of maths to adjust my pre-flop ranges but now I'm pretty comfortable.
Here are some things I've done to catch up and improve my game:
- Videos. I think these are a great starting point when pretty much everything about your game is off and I happened to have a few lying around on my HDD since 2011. There's also a lot of free videos on the net nowadays.
- Maths. End game is a lot about estimating ranges and maths. I used to do this with Equilab and Excel but found a program called ICMIZER that speeds up these calculations a lot so I purchased it.
- Reading hand evaluations. Only other peoples hands though. I had sorta forgotten that you could mark hands while playing but now that I remembered it I'm going to post some of my own in the future.
- Gone through my database to analyze population tendencies. I think my sample is too small to have much use of this though, so it was mostly learning how to do it for the future.
- Saw a video of a guy playing with a really advanced HUD that displayed villain's frequencies for different stack depths. I found it only but it cost $100 and was a bit over the top with the stats as well so I decided to write my own instead. Custom statistics was a bit tricky but I'm pleased with the result.
As for the future I think I'm best of mostly grinding to build up my roll and produce hands that I can review. If any heads up hyper player is interested in exchanging and reviewing each other's hand histories I'm game.
A short term goals for the future is to get my roll up to $750 and then start taking shots at the $15 games. I don't know if there are any regs at the $15 games, if so I'm gonna have to work a lot on that as my anti-reg game is pretty poor at the moment.
