Kruppe and Daphunk. Grinding NLHE many steaks! Pursuade Kruppe to post NL400+ HHs!

wow, long time no update again
things didn't go too well after the last update. i got so unhappy with poker that i started playing less and barely played for a week or so.
but I haven't given up yet. I'm at nl50 since my last session, BR at $555. I lost count of how often i'd switched a few weeks ago, think it's around 30 now.
anyway, I've decided to do one of those beard challenges that everyone does, but with a slight twist: I'm not going to shave until I reach nl500 (I haven't shaved for a few months anyway apart from trimming my moustaches). And if I do reach nl500, I probably won't shave anyway ♦

oh yeah, and the most recent HEM2 update has split my database or something, would be much appreciated if someone could give me some pointers regarding that.

oh, and DaPhunk is still grinding too, dunno why he never updates.

My Update:

Currently grinding away at NL25SH stars and multi-limiting on other random sites. Also I left $40 on FTP to play around with on HU Sng's when bored with SH. Here are my poker related goals for the year, most ambitious ones first;

1) Grind up to midstakes, be closer to finishing developement on my game.
2) Grind up to making $5k to $10k a month minimum
3) Have found a cool Apartment to rent, or possibly cheap flat/house to buy in South America and be living there.
4) Make Supernova this year, no specific VPP goal beyond that. SNE may be a possibility next year depending on what I'm playing at the end of the year.
5) Finish my personal poker book with as comprehensive an encapsulation of my game as possible.

That's about it, I'm hoping to make Platinum on Stars this month and make enough for a cashout to pay for a plane ticket yet still be playing NL25SH or NL50SH.

Me:

ciao for now!

Poker Stars $0.10/$0.25 No Limit Hold'em - 9 players - View hand 2055622
DeucesCracked Poker Videos Hand History Converter

BTN: $25.10
Hero (SB): $25.00
BB: $20.25
UTG: $12.57
UTG+1: $59.40
UTG+2: $25.48
MP1: $10.59
MP2: $16.96
CO: $11.90

Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is SB with A Q
7 folds, Hero raises to $0.75, BB calls $0.50

Flop: ($1.50) 2 4 K (2 players)
Hero checks, BB bets $0.75, Hero calls $0.75

Turn: ($3.00) K (2 players)
Hero checks, BB bets $1.25, Hero calls $1.25

River: ($5.50) A (2 players)
Hero checks, BB checks

Final Pot: $5.50
Hero shows A Q (two pair, Aces and Kings)
BB shows K T (three of a kind, Kings)
BB wins $5.25
(Rake: $0.25)

Poker Stars $0.10/$0.25 No Limit Hold'em - 6 players - View hand 2055623
DeucesCracked Poker Videos Hand History Converter

BTN: $9.82
SB: $33.84
72oPlešky72o: $43.23
UTG: $25.06
Hero (MP): $48.25
CO: $25.00

Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is MP with 9 9
1 fold, Hero raises to $0.75, 3 folds, 72oPlešky72o calls $0.50

Flop: ($1.60) 4 8 5 (2 players)
72oPlešky72o bets $1, Hero calls $1

Turn: ($3.60) 3 (2 players)
72oPlešky72o bets $3, Hero calls $3

River: ($9.60) 4 (2 players)
72oPlešky72o bets $8, Hero calls $8

Final Pot: $25.60
72oPlešky72o shows 2 7 (a pair of Fours)
Hero shows 9 9 (two pair, Nines and Fours)
Hero wins $24.45
(Rake: $1.15)

Poker Stars $0.10/$0.25 No Limit Hold'em - 6 players - View hand 2055632
DeucesCracked Poker Videos Hand History Converter

BTN: $25.46
SB: $46.23
BB: $26.65
UTG: $35.39
Hero (MP): $45.59
CO: $51.56

Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is MP with 6 7
1 fold, Hero raises to $0.75, 2 folds, SB calls $0.65, 1 fold

Flop: ($1.75) 7 3 7 (2 players)
SB bets $0.75, Hero raises to $2.25, SB calls $1.50

Turn: ($6.25) 6 (2 players)
SB checks, Hero bets $4, SB calls $4

River: ($14.25) 9 (2 players)
SB checks, Hero bets $20, SB calls $20

Final Pot: $54.25
SB shows 9 9 (a full house, Nines full of Sevens)
Hero shows 6 7 (a full house, Sevens full of Sixes)
SB wins $52.25
(Rake: $2.00)

Poker Stars $0.10/$0.25 No Limit Hold'em - 6 players - View hand 2055634
DeucesCracked Poker Videos Hand History Converter

BTN: $11.83
SB: $67.81
Hero (BB): $43.38
UTG: $36.50
MP: $28.49
CO: $11.80

Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is BB with A A
3 folds, BTN raises to $0.50, SB raises to $1.50, Hero raises to $3.50, 1 fold, SB calls $2

Flop: ($7.50) 2 4 9 (2 players)
SB checks, Hero bets $3.50, SB calls $3.50

Turn: ($14.50) K (2 players)
SB checks, Hero bets $7, SB calls $7

River: ($28.50) 7 (2 players)
SB checks, Hero bets $20, SB calls $20

Final Pot: $68.50
SB shows 9 9 (three of a kind, Nines)
Hero shows A A (a pair of Aces)
SB wins $66.50
(Rake: $2.00)

The new year has been going fairly well. I've been playing my A-minus game with increasing consistency,
which is great considering I've been playing mostly NL25 and NL50 recently, which would have been incredibly
hard to play well at
a few months ago. I'm confident that I'll be able to play my A game sooner or later, which will be great
after such a long time of playing badly. I've also been working creatively on my game, and
I'm happy with some changes I've come up with.

I took my first shot at NL100 yesterday and got up to ~$1300, but dropped too much in the
evening and lost again today, leaving me at $583.24. I've switched at least 35 times now.

some graphs from my current PT4 database, which I think starts soon after the last HEM2 graph i posted ends, and some hands:

Poker Stars $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold'em - 6 players - View hand 2068793
DeucesCracked Poker Videos Hand History Converter

BTN: $69.36
SB: $59.80
BB: $147.55
UTG: $96.36
MP: $83.21
Hero (CO): $60.75

Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is CO with 4 4
UTG raises to $1, 1 fold, Hero calls $1, 3 folds

Flop: ($2.75) 4 6 J (2 players)
UTG bets $2.10, Hero calls $2.10

Turn: ($6.95) J (2 players)
UTG bets $3.98, Hero raises to $9.50, UTG calls $5.52

River: ($25.95) 2 (2 players)
UTG checks, Hero bets $14, UTG calls $14

Final Pot: $53.95
UTG shows 6 6 (a full house, Sixes full of Jacks)
Hero shows 4 4 (a full house, Fours full of Jacks)
UTG wins $51.52
(Rake: $2.43)

Poker Stars $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold'em - 6 players - View hand 2068794
DeucesCracked Poker Videos Hand History Converter

Hero (BTN): $59.98
SB: $38.00
BB: $49.13
UTG: $25.00
MP: $49.74
CO: $49.62

Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is BTN with Q J
3 folds, Hero raises to $1.35, SB calls $1.10, 1 fold

Flop: ($3.20) 7 K 3 (2 players)
SB checks, Hero bets $1.50, SB raises to $4.50, Hero raises to $10, SB calls $5.50

Turn: ($23.20) J (2 players)
SB bets $16.50, Hero raises to $33, SB calls $10.15 all in

River: ($76.50) Q (2 players - 1 is all in)

Final Pot: $76.50
Hero shows Q J (two pair, Queens and Jacks)
SB shows K T (a pair of Kings)
Hero wins $74.00
(Rake: $2.50)

Poker Stars $0.10/$0.25 No Limit Hold'em - 6 players - View hand 2068795
DeucesCracked Poker Videos Hand History Converter

BTN: $18.41
SB: $18.38
BB: $18.33
Hero (UTG): $25.05
MP: $29.58
CO: $47.67

Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is UTG with T A
Hero raises to $0.75, 1 fold, CO calls $0.75, 2 folds, BB calls $0.50

Flop: ($2.35) Q Q 4 (3 players)
BB checks, Hero checks, CO bets $1.50, BB folds, Hero calls $1.50

Turn: ($5.35) 6 (2 players)
Hero checks, CO checks

River: ($5.35) 5 (2 players)
Hero checks, CO checks

Final Pot: $5.35
Hero shows T A (a flush, Ace high)
CO mucks Q T
Hero wins $5.11
(Rake: $0.24)

fk it, played 300 hands of nl50 after writing that update and got ridiculously crushed, nl25 now

I failed at my zoom challenge, gave up.

that's right, not every one of these challenges that poker players make threads about actually succeeds. sometimes they just fail.

my beard looked pretty horrible at the end, especially the neckbeard. have a photo somewhere, can't find it right now though.

i think i stopped mid-january, somewhere at nl25, after switching limits 40 times or so. the grind was making me very unhappy, it was getting harder and harder to get volume in. i even resorted to watching jackie chan films on my lap-top while playing 6 tables on my main screen(down from 8) just to keep myself positive/relaxed(i never watch films/TV whilst seriously grinding). I stopped because of how bad it was making me feel, but also because it was taking so long that the lack of real winnings was becoming relevant.

i did put in a lot of effort. i could have put more effort in, and i'm sure i would have succeeded eventually, but i didn't.

but i didn't fail on all counts. despite stopping in the end, i did manage to grind through a staggering amount of shit. i definitely wasn't expecting to switch limits so many times, but it wasn't just the frequency, but the timing. very many times i spent hours grinding at the brink of the next higher limit, then finally moved up, then very quickly lost 2+ stacks and had to move down. it's hard to describe how unpleasant that is.
also, imanaged to adapt to all the different microstakes limits. i took each one seriously despite the tiny sums of money, something i had often failed at before, and i made a lot of adjustments to the various meta-games.

for the last couple of months i've really not been interested in poker been playing a bit on some euro sites, not really pushing myself. maybe sometime i'll try zoom again, but i'd probably start at nl50 or something.

Oh Em Ghees! An upd4t3! What unprecendenteddededly good reading

If you do another challenge I'd be interested to see how you would do if you were to just play 2 tables to play a sort of game-flow dynamic/ leveling style LAG game. I think this style is quite a long way from your current game so it would be cool to see how you would do manipulating the shit out of your ranges.

I don't think I need to Illustrate, but I'm talking about the sort of game-plan some HU guys for example use where they sometimes 3bet pure trash just because they haven't raised an open in a while and think the dynamic has changed sufficiently they will get a ton of folds.

.

reached diamond again for the first time in.... about 5 years? started playing tracked on unibet. 200k lifetime strategy points! should have blackmember by 2025 at the latest.

poker has been going better since i stopped trying to beat microstakes.

Hello.

I still happen to be playing the pokers this time on Unibet and am struggling somewhat with what feels like completely ridiculous variance. It feels like a very long time since I had a similar large 2 or 3 week down-swing/break-even stretch, selective memory and whatnot.

I decided to write down some impressive looking goals for this coming month, bear in mind I'm extremely bad at hitting my goals!

November goals:
- Deal with procrastination. Start the required number of poker sessions per day, just with the intention of stopping quickly for a 'reward'. Once I've started I seem to keep going so just starting is the difficult step for me.
- Try and do the most unpleasant task for the day first.
- Try and see how close I can get to putting in this mystical 50 hour poker week I've heard so much about. 200 hour month ?!?!? I seem to struggle putting in 2/3 of that.
- Deliberately practice different aspects of my game and switch between different things to practice. Try to recall important lessons while playing.
- Finally for 200 hours work I'd like to make minimum between 1 and 1.5k but we'll see how this break-even stretch continues and how much my game unravels ♦

So this last week I managed to put in not even half the hours needed for this mythical '50 hour target'.
I put in 16 sessions though which is actually more than normal so I think I am improving a little on the procrastination side of things where I have the most difficulty in simply starting sessions so I'm happy about that.
I went climbing all Sunday too which was nice, it has been some time since I was on a rope so that is good for me as well.

I don't have graphs or HH's as I play Unibet but still decided to make this update. I thought I'd just brake down the number of hours in a week for now:

7 x 24 = 168 hours per week.
9 hours sleep (plus washing) x 7 = 63 hours per week.
1 hour lunch, 1 hour dinner, 0.5 hour breakfast. 2.5 x 7 = 17.5 hours per week.

So 168 - 63 - 17.5 = 87.5 hours per week were we are not sleeping, eating or washing.

This means that if we want to put in 50 hours at the tables on any given week we need to be spending roughly 57% of our waking life playing poker. Depending on how you look at it that could be considered rather a lot, or 'not that much' because you 'Still' get 37.5 hours of free time each week.

Personally I think it is a large amount of time to be doing something as mentally intensive as poker. If I succeed in making this goal I'm surprised to find out I could still say 'heh, I only spent a bit over half my waking time playing. I got quite a bit of free time'

Well I need 9 hours for sleep, and on average about and hour for washing ♦
...and about two hours for breakfast.

I'm glad I'm not trying to be a high volume grinder anymore, not that I ever set myself specific numbers of hours.

But if I were, I would consider new approaches to splitting up one's time across various processes. For example, have you considered playing poker whilst brushing your teeth? But I guess that's silly. More realistically, how about eating whilst being asleep? Possibly intra-venous nutrition while you sleep, possibly hyper-compacted pill-form food that you just swallow in 2 seconds and digest during sleep. Or just sleep in your dinner break and have your servant gently poker food down your throat. Even easier whilst sleeping is getting dressed and un-dressed. Again, servants are a useful means to maximising efficiency here. And why not eat whilst showering? Maybe with some kind of feeding tube or foods that posess structural integrity that isn't severely compromised by mass water contact.

Hello, forum readers!

It occurs to me that I haven't posted any hand histories in a very long time, and that I have played a lot of hands in the last year or so that could be fun to read. (And, from the perspective of protecting my edge, posting HHs is actually quite harmless as long as I don't post reads and my thought process.)

So, what kind of HHs would you like to see? I've got hands from nl200-2k. Do you want to see:
big bluffs?
weird lines?
big hero-folds?
big hero-calls?
big mistakes? (I still occasionally make big mistakes, and maybe it's interesting to see what mistakes a winning mid-stakes player will admit to making)

Hello all.

So a quick week review. I had a fun week, games were feeling nice and for some reason I let myself make various mistakes but feel fine about it, so I'm pretty happy about that. I put it partly down to this fact that I stopped worrying about making mistakes that enable me to pull off some nice lines I was still a little tilted by 2 of them (deep pots) but not as much as as I would have been in the past. It helps that I'm pleased I was able to not just give up in those spots too due to fear which Is probably what would have happened in the past.

As for hours played, I was again, a shave under 1/2 of this 50 hour target. I played more on 5 days, played just 1 hour on one and none on Sunday again due to another climbing trip. I am not entirely sure how I was able to grind so much in the past and in the various rake races that I've played in. In march for example I was able to finish 3rd in a raked hands race where I pretty much played a minimum of 8 hours a day for 30 days in a row. The first week of that I was putting even putting in some 10 to 12 hour days.

As for Kruppes question in the previous post.....

Originally posted by Kruppe
So, what kind of HHs would you like to see? I've got hands from nl200-2k. Do you want to see:
big mistakes?

This has my vote ♦ Partly because of some slight curiosity regarding what you consider a big mistake!

I have decided to change the title of the blog to see if we can get some more views. I think Kruppe will be obliged to post an NL2k hand history or two if we get.... lets say 5 responses I reckon he could also find some interesting graphs to post, for example "vs opponent X at HU".

I myself moved my bankroll to some sites with no tracking but I did leave $40 or something to mess around on stars with. This graph might show how ridiculous variance can get even when you win several limits higher. The majority of this is NL2 with only a sprinkling of play on NL5 and 10.

Also, as I have been writing this a small light aircraft has just started circling with a loudspeaker attached to it "attencion attencion mall trebol blablabla" who out of you would get tilted by this?

so you're saying you were -EV at nl2 after 14k hands? Yeah, I'm sure that's just 'ridiculous variance', buddy.

"attencion attencion mall trebol blablabla" that sounds dangerous though, what does it mean? Invasion and or earth-quake?

To be fair I was never actually down at NL2, the dip is exaggerated by some NL5 and NL10 play but still thought it would be funny to post the Garfield.

Wow. I feel a little bit like my mind is unravelling when it comes to poker. I am losing so often in spots where I feel 95% ahead and am constantly being surprised by my opponents. I feel like no one is playing anywhere near standard and somehow everyone is a fish or whale. The frequency of medium to large pots seems super high suggesting I am still not loose enough despite my adaptations and I feel like my brain is melting.

I think maybe I need a small rest to process everything

Weekly hours for last week, I yet again put in just a shave under 25 hours. It was raining yesterday so didn't get my day out climbing but still decided to not play any poker. These are the final days of November and I think I shall try and finally put in an exceptional number of hours. Will see how today goes first. Going to try and make a schedule.

I am also thinking that maybe I should try writing down my balance at the start and end of each month (or week?) and continue trying to focus out my bankroll in the lobby which is easier said than done.

So I think I shall try something new today. I am going to plan my time now and write it here, then write how I Actually spent my time after I have done it. I have made a little google spreadsheet but I can summarise here.

It 11:54am here in Chile so I shall start this from midday.

Plan
Play 6-8 tables 12-14:00 --------------- Played 12:05 till 13:47 for lunch
Lunch and TV 14 - 15:00 -- Check
Play 6-8 tables 15 - 18:00 ------------------- Played 14:50 till 17:00 when Unibet crashed. (excluding hour waiting around waiting for Unibet to start up again)
Coffee break! 18-18:30 -- Used up by the time spent waiting over the Unibet crash
6-8 tables 18:30 - 20:30 ---------------- About to start session 3 18:53 . internet crash 19:19--
Free time 20:30-21:00 ------------ new session 19:35 - 23:23 no break -----------
4-6 tables 21-23:00
Free time 23+

result: I managed to play 8 hours despite problems with unibet and one with my own internet. Not bad I suppose, maybe there is hope for me yet

wow, 8 hours? impressive

'I am also thinking that maybe I should try writing down my balance at the start and end of each month (or week?) '

I suggest writing it down at the start of each year, so at 00:00 on New Year's day, and for the rest of the year you make quarterly guestimates at your bankroll. And making sure you don't see your balance by mistake is easy, post-its were invented for a reason! By now i can only see about 2/5ths of my screen unless i flap some of the post-its up.