Escaping the Micros

Let me start of by telling the story of Simpleme..

I got to know poker through a friend of mine who told me that he was gonna rent a studio paying it with his poker winnings every month. I started laughing and told him that gambling really was not healthy. (FYI this same friend just had another 30.000$ week ) .

When more people in my direct environment started playing poker, they convinced me to try and take a 50$ no deposit bonus and see if I could run it up. I started grinding some 100.000 hands of 2nl, pretty BE and living of bonusses to build my roll. When I hit 4nl I started thinking a little bit more about poker and worked myself up pretty quickly to 50 nl .

I got to the point where I built op my roll to 40 bi at 50 nl. However, I needed some money so the same friend from the first paragraph told me he would give my my roll in cash if I kept grinding on a backing deal. I accepted the offer, took my girlfriend on a great holiday to greece and started grinding 50 nl with some coaching from DC coach Inavacuum. If you take a look at hand 0 to about 11000, you can see that I went on a pretty big heater. I felt like I could take on every player and solved the game of poker….

As you can clearly see from hand 11000 to about 25000, I was fairly wrong :) I went on a 20 bi downswing which got me listening to Tommy Angelo. However, this was not enough to get this graph going up again, running bad when your skill level is not as high as you perceive it to be can really take bites out of your roll. Thank god for the rakebacks :)

So after realizing that I was not the next Phil Ivey, I decided that the best way to get out of a downswing is to try and work on my game as much as possible. The DC community has been a great help doing this. Sweat sessions with Peesocake, zuberi and other people have been great when I felt like giving up. The results of all this are clearly visible in my 30K hands upswing starting at hand 40.000 .

However, upswings are not endless, those sexy 60 degress angles will turn in to scary downhill slopes. I have had some terrible sessions lately, I can ramble endlessly posting hand histories of getting 3 outed or setup in a 3bet pot, but those things happen and they will keep happening. The key here is something that Tommy Angelo wrote to me when I ordered his book: “In order to become a winning poker player, you have to get good at losing first” .

So where are we right now and why would we wanna start blogging?

Since I have lost a big part of my roll (the holdemmanager graph does not take in account that some of the losses were on € and £ ) I decided that it would be better for me to take a step back and start grinding 50 nl again until I have 35-40 Bi for 100 nl again. (i am at 33 at the moment) . I could use some more aggressive bankroll management but I am aware that I will get way to attached to the money if I’m playing on a smaller bankroll.

So why have I been writing this post for the last 20 minutes? I am convinced that writing this stuff down as kind of a diary is +EV for several reasons:

- I have a sort of control mechanism every week which will force me to objectively look at my approach to the game every week.
- I can get some input from you guys on the things I do and hopefully get some honest comment on my mistakes.
- It can serve as a reference for a lot of the micro grinders out there who are in a similar situation.

I will try to update this blog weekly for the next 6 months, posting my progress and some video’s that I make.