Originally posted by elpsycho
Originally posted by Ramble
Not sure you are looking at that quite right - There are 1326 possible starting hands, with the odds of hitting pocket Aces being 220:1. Even with those odds though - still not promising.
The rules were to win with the A♥:A♦: exactly
Oh... haha I missed that... 
The 2014 is almost over, so happy New Year everybody! I wish this year will be a blast for everyone, and I sincerely hope that you will reach your goals in poker and in life, and do it with a smile on your face!
For me the 2014 wasn’t the best year regarding poker but at least it got me back to the game. Before that I was jumping in and out of the game and now I know I want to stay and see where my poker journey will get me.
I have a lot of expectations and hopes for the 2015. But maybe hope isn’t the right word, because hope won’t get you anywhere in poker. Better word would be determination to achieve the goals I set for myself. I know it won’t be easy, but I love challenges and I feel prepared.
My main goal for this year will be to become a regular on NL50 and depending on when I get there, I will maybe take a shot at Supernova on Poker Stars. The last one maybe a bit ambitious regarding the volume I can grind in the spare time that my life leaves me to play poker, but eventually, as I become a better player, I will be able to dedicate more time to this game, which I love so much.
I really love poker in all its forms and manifestations. My love for poker is not limited to NL Hold’em, and I have played a lot of mixed games, my favorites being Omaha8, 2-7 Triple Draw, Razz and Badugi. I wish I could dedicate more time studying other formats, but for now if I want to maintain the Poker Stars status and get some decent rakeback, I feel like I need to focus on playing NL Hold’em, as it still is my strongest game and it allows me to put in a lot of volume comfortably. I hope I will find some time in the 2015 to play mixed games a bit more and eventually add them to my grind. In fact playing mixed games really improved my understanding of Hold’em. For example, I have always heard that position is important in poker, we all have, but not until I played a lot of 2-7 Triple Draw did I understand how powerful position really is and it really improved my game. In the same manner the Stud games go a long way of teaching the importance of outs and pot-odds. So I will return to playing mixed games eventually.
I feel that the main obstacle for me this year could be variance, as it reigns over poker more than anything really. It’s hard to be breakeven over large samples of hands, not knowing if it’s the variance or just poor skill. So this year I will be committing even more time to improving my mental game. I was studying some notes I made about a year ago about the state of my mental game, and, man, I totally forgot what a tilt monkey I was. My mental game improved tremendously this year, and I am very eager to continue working on it.
The main change that I am going to make from now on is including warm-ups before every session, no excuses. I tried to do them now and again, but it never stuck to my routine. I really underestimated the importance of warming-up and I wish I realized sooner how important it is and how much influence it has on sessions. I found a cool site called pokerwarmup.com that helps build a warm-up routine, and I will be using it for my warm-ups from now on and see where it gets me. And of course I will continue putting a lot of hours into theoretical study, following the list of concepts I made earlier.
So overall in the 2015 there will be a lot of learning and a lot of grinding, and I’m really looking forward to it. I wish that someday I could play poker professionally. I know how difficult it is and how much struggle it can be to make that choice, because it is a gamble after all. But I am willing to make that choice, and I hope the 2015 will show me if it’s the right one.
Most poker player’s relationship with poker begins out of obsession. If you have never spent hours tinkering with Excel sheets, PokerStove, your HEM stats, or railing the $ 25/ $ 50 games immersed in a personal fantasy, then you will probably never be a great player. Every great player I have ever known has started with this obsession.
The obsession is not always a healthy one. It usually isn’t. For many, it digs into them, and handful at a time, scoops out the pulp of their life. Before long, through fantasies, through poker books and forums, through breakfasts contemplating how to balance their turn overbetting ranges— poker possesses them. It enters them like a virus, a parasite. It rallies every resource they have toward fulfilling the dream of poker.
No one else will tell you this, but I will tell you the truth: if you do not have this— if you have never been taken over, if this mania has not hijacked your mind— then you should give up on poker. Walk away now. You will never be a great player. Chances are, you will only lose money and time. You are liable to only hurt yourself and those around you.
This is the truth . If you are not a little bit crazy, you will never reach the level of excellence and dedication required to master poker.
But let’s say you are a little bit crazy. Let’s say you wake up in the middle of the night from dreams of hands you’ve played the day before. Let’s say you fantasize, calculate, strategize, obsess. Then perhaps poker is for you. Perhaps that fire will propel you. Dive further into its depths. Once you do, poker itself will be the easy part. Even when it’s not easy, it will be easy.
Qureshi, Haseeb. How to Be a Poker Player: The Philosophy of Poker.
Loving your goals for 2015 and can definitely relate to a lot of them.
Really look forward to your progress in 2015 and I am 100% positive you will become poker pro if you do follow through with everything you have set out here.
All the best and enjoy the new year celebration tomorrow!
Thanks Ivica!
I also wish you a good new year celebration and fullfilment of all your goals in 2015!
Had a little break from poker this week, so played very few hands.
Hands: 2,428
Result: -$34.63
Bankroll: $715.79
Now it’s time to return to grinding and studying. I’m very excited about the first part of w34z3l’s new series on improving the red-line in which he took a look at my DB and pointed out some leaks. So for the next couple of months I will focus on resolving them and continue studying different concepts. The good thing is that most leaks occur in areas that were high on my studying list. And also it appears that my study of playing from the blinds paid off in the end, which is great, but there is still a lot to learn.
This week was very busy and as a result I didn’t manage to put in enough volume, but I hope I will have more time to play poker in the near future.
Hands: 5,321
Result: +$90.23
Bankroll: $806.02
Although I didn’t play much poker this week, I spend some time studying my database and plugging major leaks in my game, which were pointed out by w34z3l. As a result my game changed quite a bit and I’m still experimenting with some stuff. Next week I will continue studying specific concepts and improving weak areas of my game.
During the last couple of months as I was concentrating on certain spots, such as steals and blind play, I haven’t noticed that other aspects of my game slipped to their C-Game state, which is a good indicator that even basic concepts in my game like 3-betting, flop aggression and defending enough vs cbets are far from being learned to the level of Unconscious Competence.
Now that I’m aware of certain issues of my game I will try to rebuild my game step by step and hopefully remove leaks that bleed money from my bankroll.
Also this week I started applying the same method of conceptual study to learning Omaha8. As with Holdem, I began by dissecting preflop ranges from every position, taking into account different variables at the table, which, to be honest, is a pain in the ass, given that you’re being dealt 4 cards instead of 2. Who knew that Holdem is such an easy game after all!
So overall, now that I know what has to be done with my game I have a lot of studying ahead of me. I hope there will also be some time left for grinding though, since I have to do a lot of stuff for my daytime job and also last I checked there is a thing called “life” that needs some attention too. Well, nobody said it would be easy, but I’m very eager to continue my poker journey. 
He elpsycho,
how is it going? We're missing your updates to our bankroll challenge :-(
Also, how is your content challenge from a few posts above running?
See here for the reporting thread: https://www.pokerstrategy.com/forum/thread.php?threadid=326222&page=7
CU,SvenBe
Originally posted by SvenBe
He elpsycho,how is it going? We're missing your updates to our bankroll challenge
Also, how is your content challenge from a few posts above running?See here for the reporting thread: https://www.pokerstrategy.com/forum/thread.php?threadid=326222&page=7
CU,SvenBe
Hey, SvenBe!
Yeah, I've been quite busy these past few weeks, but I'm preparing my weekly report right now. And which content challenge are you referring to? I'm feeling a bit lost in my own blog
Here are the results of this week:
Hands: 7,290
Won: +$93.52
Backed a friend: -$16.50
Milestone: +$10
Cash bonus: +$75
Total: +162.02
Bankroll: $968.04
This week I’ve continued to do some database analysis and experiment with my game. My game changed quite a bit in the past couple of weeks as I’m finding more and more areas that need improving. Also I spent some time actively studying the poker theory and I’m thinking about investing some money into buying CREV, which will immensely help me in my studies.
As a side-challenge I’ve decided to grind up a bit of money in Omaha8 to buy an OM2 license. I don’t know how long will it take, since my primary focus is on NL Holdem and I’m trying to spend as much time as possible to improve it, but I feel that it would be a nice motivation to continue improving in other games as well and getting closer to my goal of adding mixed games to my grind.
Overall this week was quite busy and I didn’t have too much time to play poker. Still I feel that I learned a lot, and to be honest I’m a bit overwhelmed with the amount of study that needs to be done. So I guess I better go crunch some numbers.
he there, I was refering to the Bankroll challenge!
btw before you buy CREV, have a look at the platinum videos from tackleberry. He did a CREV analysis session, and you should get something out of your platinum status!!!!!
Link: Kill em by the numbers
Originally posted by SvenBe
he there, I was refering to the Bankroll challenge!
btw before you buy CREV, have a look at the platinum videos from tackleberry. He did a CREV analysis session, and you should get something out of your platinum status!!!!!
Link: Kill em by the numbers
Thanks, I will definitely take a look at those!
I will spend some time with a trial version before buying a licence, so these videos will help a lot in learning the basics. 
Hey, I follow your blog because of good content and I think you are a good writer ♠_thumbsup:
Sent you a friend request, do you have skype? (if yes can i have it in a pm please)
Originally posted by Anomic
Hey, I follow your blog because of good content and I think you are a good writer ♠_thumbsup:Sent you a friend request, do you have skype? (if yes can i have it in a pm please)
Thanks, man!
Sure, I'll pm you my skype
For the last few days I’ve been dedicating all my study time to learning how to use CREV. I’ve been messing around with a trial version, which is missing some key features such as Maximum exploitative play tool and scripting, and allows you to create only 5 decision nodes, so basically you are limited to solving some simple pre-flop situations like 3-4-5-bet game. Still, after playing with some ranges and running simple simulation, I can say that I fell in love with this software and I’m looking forward to investing hundred bucks of my bankroll into my study and further development as a poker player in a form of a CREV license.
Here is an interesting spot that I simulated recently, which taught me a lot about the significance of pre-flop betsizings. Maybe it’s a common knowledge, but I never thought about it this way, and found the results quite surprising.
I’ve decided to study a simple pre-flop situation, in which CO opens, BTN 3-bets him, CO decides to 4-bet and so on. It’s a very common spot even at micros, and regs are 3-betting quite wide from the BTN vs a CO open.
As a starting template I took w34z3l’s preflop ranges from his 6max walkthrough, which are as follows:
CO opening range:
BTN 3-betting range:
CO 4-betting range:
As for 5-bet shoving and calling ranges I think they are pretty much clear cut. My assumption in this spot is that regs at micros are pretty much never 5-bet shoving with bluffs, so a typical reg will have a 5-betting range only for value, which looks something like JJ+, AK. And as for CO’s calling range, he obviously ditches his 4-bet bluffing range and calls with QQ+,AK.
Also in my CREV analysis I omitted the weights in the ranges above and for simplicity assumed that players play every combo of given hands.
So I plugged these ranges into a decision tree and got this result:
As we can see, this strategy seems pretty balanced (at least until the 5-bet part) and +EV for both players, and in the long run everyone gets their share of the blinds.
But then I noticed, that given these pre-flop betsizings, CO is actually losing a bit of money when he calls a shove with AKo:
And our call with AKo only becomes profitable if we start making our 4-bets more than 21 bbs:
By doing it, we are committing ourselves to call with AKo against a 5-bet shove, and calling becomes a correct profitable play, but it doesn’t change our overall EV in this situation, and more importantly it increases EV of BTN’s 3-bets and as a result increases his overall EV, which we sure as hell don't want.
So I guess against a player who never calls 4-bets, it’s better to make a smaller 4-bet, in which case AKo becomes a 4-bet bluff and should be folded to a 5-bet shove. Of course everything changes if BTN starts adding some bluffs in his shoving range, but as I said, I don’t think regs at micros are doing that. Also if BTN shoves only for value and never bluffs, CO has a green light to exploitatively 4-bet him as much as he likes. In fact, until BTN starts adding 5-bet bluffs to his range, CO can 4-bet every hand he opens and it will be massively profitable for him. And then the exploitative leveling wars begin!
But yeah, the main idea is that I didn’t even suspect, that 4-bet/calling with AKo can be –EV in a CO vs BTN situation. Of course it is only a rough estimate of this situation, and there can be a lot of 3-bet and 4-bet flatting, but still I think that at micros it’s pretty close, and definitely something to think about.
One of my favorite if not my favorite blog!
Please keep up the serious and great work you are doing. I am 100% that with work rate you are displaying, you will become professional poker player.
Your latest blog posts deals with everything I have been working on. I don't use CREV but am definitely planning getting it.
I have no major doubts pre flop, my main problems occur post flop. Took me 1 hour to write out full thinking process for 2 hands this morning!
CG is the nuts.
Keep up the great work, following with huge interest and great expectations for you!
Thanks Ivica!
I really appreciate that you like my blog!
Now that you're playing CG, I hope I'll reach your stakes and we'll meet at the tables sometime!
Originally posted by elpsycho
Thanks Ivica!I really appreciate that you like my blog!
Now that you're playing CG, I hope I'll reach your stakes and we'll meet at the tables sometime!
You welcome man!
With this sort of pre flop analysis you are ready to play NL50 easily.
How is your post flop going? What software are you using to improve it?
Originally posted by Anomic
Ty for posting that here, looking forward to more of that ♠_thumbsup:
You're welcome! I'll definitely post some more analysis, especially when I get the full license.
Originally posted by IvicaIliev77
You welcome man!With this sort of pre flop analysis you are ready to play NL50 easily.
How is your post flop going? What software are you using to improve it?
At the moment I'm using flopzilla and a plain text document to break down ranges. I'm looking for what I think is an optimal strategy in given spot, without obvious holes, and then adjust it one way or the other to a specific situation, given opponents stats, etc. But I'm looking forward to doing some postflop analysis in CREV in the near future.
