playing a game for a living = +EV

So I haven’t posted in a week – heres basically whats happened. I took a few days off – last Tuesday was my birthday, and combined with the fact that I was feeling under the weather the beginning of the week, led me to taking a birthday hiatus for a few days. I started playing again on Thursday, with a new game plan that I had come up with during my break. Basically, after playing rush poker for about a month and a half, and heads up for 4-5 months, I decided I enjoy heads up much better than 6max, and that I am better at it which builds my confidence. I was only able to beat 6max for about 1ptBB, where I beat heads up for about 5ptBB over 200,000 hands. The psychology of heads up and owning people repeatdedly is very appealing to me. Its a game where you have to outthink your opponent, and at 50Nl and 100NL this is very, very easy to do. The one on one aspect of it is also great. I’ve always like playing someone one on one in anything, and beating them. Its part of being a male, and being human, a drive to outcompete others. If you can gain a lot of momentum in a heads up match, and keep playing against a tilted opponent, theres nothing better. My record is winning 14.5 buyins vs the same opponent, and nothing feels better than repeatedly stacking the same guy over and over, and just completely owning him.

Heads up definately improved my game sooooo much when I played it for 4 months. I think it improved my game much more than playing rush poker without gameflow did. Given the choice to play 6max or HU, I think I prefer HU, but 6max is a good break from HU if I ever need it.

So things started off a little rough, thursday and friday lost a few buyins. Then saturday, I had an incredible day, winning about 20 buyins at 50NL and 100NL for 1400 bux. This really boosted my confidence, and reminded me why I love heads up so much. I began playing 50NL again because my bankroll was down to 10,000 dollars, because I had to withdraw 20,000 for taxes and living expenses for the next 6 months, and I need to build my bankroll back up. But 50NL is also a joke, filled with phish who will sit at your table very quickly. So I open up tables of 100NL and 50NL whenever I sit down, but will only play very phishy phish at 50NL because theres so many, and through this game selection I hope to achieve a very high winrate. My 50NL winrate is about 8.5ptBB over 40,000 hands, so this is definately solid. I plan on splitting my roll, which is now at 12,000, over full tilt and poker stars when I move to Cali, so I can game select between the 2 sites. I’ll probably also put some money on absolute poker and game select there. Hopefully with 3-4 months I am grinding 200NL again, and possibly even 400NL. But right now I’m just focused on building my bankroll, and crushing low stakes HU. My goal is to play about 50 hours a week and watch 5-10 videos. I get about 300 hands an hour, so I’m gonna try to get in 60,000 hands a month, but if I get a bit less than this I won’t be too upset. My primary goal is to achieve the highest winrate possible, quit when I am tilting even slightly, and play my A game at all times. If this means watching more videos one week and playing a little less because I am downswinging, then this will happen. Or if I need to take a break for a day b/c things aren’t going well, it is overall better for my game then trying to grind out 2000 hands while semi tilted. But I think I can get close to 60,000 hands in a month. I’m game selecting to the max right now, in order to minimize variance and build my bankroll back up to a comfortable level. So if you’re fairly competent, and want to play me, you’ll have to wait until I feel more comfortable with my bankroll lol. I will 2 table regulars a few times a week for practice, but thats about it. And I typically won’t play regulars at all at 50NL b/c of the vast amount of rake paid and the over abundance of complete idiots.

I should be in Cali in 5-6 weeks, and CANNOT WAIT. Nice weather = +EV!!! The past few days here have been pretty nice, and it definately put me in a good mood. Well I’m done with the post – I’ll try to keep posting regularly, I don’t know why I took a week off. GL at the tables.