Bankroll update: £1,124

March ended up being a meh month. Played 12,500 hands and made £5 overall before rakeback, running £10 over EV - the weird thing being that there were only 2 sessions all month that i won or lost more than 1.5BI. I played pretty good but not great through most of the month but as with Feb, it really felt like I just wasn't getting the rub of the green with lots of bad run-outs and a few coolers. It felt decent breaking even in the face of what felt like a lot of bad luck, but there's always the risk i'm running better than I think I am. The good news is my bankroll grew with rakeback and bonuses and I took my first shot at 50NL booking a small win.

the first 1K hands of April however went really well, winning 5BI overall and playing one of the best sessions of my life. Also I have a tonne coming up - the Marathon is in 1 week, April 9th and at the end of May I'm going to Russia with a friend who is a Pro to play in the pokerstars champs for a week and a half! about a week after I'm back, I've got a week and a half in Georgia with a tonne of friends for a wedding so exciting couple of months coming up. Fingers crossed I'll be playing regularly at 50NL by the time I make it to Russia!! 30% rakeback plus 15%ish from bonuses goes a long way when taking shots!.

finally worked out how to hero-call =)

Question for anybody reading who has ever successfully moved up in stakes - what was it that allowed you to successfully break through?

I'm now around the bankroll to take shots at 50NL (28BI) which is a stake I've played before but not one I've won at. I've been through some bad swings at 50NL before, like a 20BI downswing in 4K hands and am feeling a little apprehensive about moving up. Especially since the buyin gap from 20NL to 50NL is on the larger side, a -4BI session causing me to rebuild the roll becomes a -10BI session when back at 20NL. I'm super confident at 20NL at the moment but I've got the monkey of my past failures on my back so I want to give myself the best shot at breaking through this time.

BR: £1,290

Great April so far. Ran the Paris marathon! I was about an hour and 3 mins slower than I wanted to be but I think I sweated too much in the heat, lost a tonne of salt and got cramp in both thighs 23km into the race, finishing the race with cramp in my groin, both calves and both thighs so I can be excused for my 5 hr 18 min time.

I also started taking some shots at 50NL but not at 100% confidence at the moment. Although April's been great I feel like I'm spending less time in my A game than I was in Feb and March, despite those months being breakeven. I'm still not hitting my hand targets so not putting in much study time at all - still trying to find somebody to replace my old study buddy CrazyCookie. I should hit my 20K hands this month though if I play every day from now until the end of the month which'll help me push on into May.

my year so far:



I'm thinking of purchasing PIOsolver at some point soon. I've done some range vs range work on different boards before but it'd be good to get some deeper analysis on exactly what and when I should be doing certain things on certain boards. There are a few things I want to study (playing A high boards, raising Cbets, bet sizings and playing different draws specifically) that having a proper analysis tool would really help with. I've got the free PIO software which only allows you to look at turns and rivers and I think CREV comes with an analysis tool for free that I'll check out first.

When you move up a stake get someone to sweat you who plays that limit, I find that helps TONS. When I used to take shots I would be weak-tight, over-fold and give up less.

25 to 50nl is a big jump, defo worth sweating a few sessions with someone. I'd also never play more than 2 tables when taking shots to better understand how regs at the new level play.

Oh sick a couple of my mates ran the marathon! Gotta think you are all really brave to do it with everything going on out there atm!

@Discomfort Any chance you play zoom/fast forward? Maybe we could do couple of sweat sessions together. I am not any crusher but maybe if we work a bit together it can help us both.

About the PIO solver. I am also thinking about buying it. but still not decided as I do only play for fun. Do you think it is be possible to share it in some way? Bcs if there is a way. I am in

Yeah it did run through my mind but I wanted to do it bad enough. There was security and men with guns but definitely felt a little risky. I'll probably be going back next year to beat the course properly and make it to the end without cramping!

Thanks Harvey, I'll try that - I also find having somebody sweat forces you not to tilt so there's always that angle!



I used to play Zoom on stars but moved away (I always knew the standard was high but didn't want to move because of the software). Now I play 9 tables of 6 max on PKR.

PIO there isn't a way to share - it's like Holdem Manager where you pay for a key and can only use it on 1 machine, or pay extra to get it on more machines.

Happy to do sweats and stuff - I do find that other types of study like talking about hands, running through spots, looking through Databases and finding leaks of population tendencies works better for improving but sweating is also fine, especially at the start to get a feel for each other's game.

My skype i think is hebear3 from the UK - hit me up there if you want to do any work (you or anybody else playing 6 max holdem).

Great month in April - BR ended the month at £1,520 and starting to take shots at 50NL with a healthy 35BI+ BR.




spent a lot of time playing my B game - definitely hard to stay in your A game when playing 9 tables so I might drop down to 6 for a little bit when playing 50NL. I'm still fairly pleased with how well I'm playing - my B game is so much better than my A game used to be.




I said before that Feb and March felt like I was crushing but running bad and ended both months breakeven so now the luck has turned in my favour it's good to see the results following =). It's really interesting to see that my green line tends to be better over periods where my redline is worse! probably just a result of getting paid off in those periods so winnings going to blue rather than red.

I'll be aiming for 20K hands again in May, but I'm going to Russia to play for the final 10 days of the month so I'm likely to fall a little short but we'll see. It would be great to go to Russia having already settled properly at 50NL. I don't have any plans on taking shots at 100NL for a long time - even if i'm winning at 50NL there's a lot of study I want to put into a lot of different spots before I'd feel comfortable taking shots but maybe it's on the horizon!

Sick graphs, defo play less tables when moving up to start with, you'll feel better, play better and be less prone to tilt if you lose a bunch of stacks so fast.

Russia for a holiday?

Thanks, I've run pretty well so far =) I'm hoping they look the same after 200K hands! Even a small win rate if consistent could mean an extra 5K-7K extra in the bank at the end of the year which would be such a huge bonus.

I've definitely noticed it's much easier to snap-decide in a lot of spots when playing 9 tables, it does take mental energy to maintain the focus needed to think through every decision so I've given 6 tables at 50NL a go for now and it's definitely much much better for the quality of play so I'll stick with that for a while.

My m8 won a seat to the pokerstars whatever event in Sochi so I'm going along with him for 10 days of solid live poker. Last time I went along with him to Scotland for a week and ended up running terrible and losing 10BI at 200NL live so fingers crossed my luck's better this time round.

Boom on 50nl, hopefully some run good to begin with gets you settled asap!

how much is the seat worth, I'd wanna snap sell it than have to visit Scotland .

PKR went bankrupt this week so back to the search for a decent poker room :'(

The BR on PKR was somewhere between 1.5K and 1.6K so here's hoping we'll get all of that back at some point soon. I'm not 100% sure what level of funds protection they had so have my fingers crossed

I have a couple of holidays coming up over the next couple of months so I'm thinking at the moment about depositing 1K on partypoker (about 20% RB plus 25% for the deposit bonus) and clearing £200-£250 of their deposit bonus, then when the holidays are over moving over to BetVictor (30% RB + 25% deposit bonus) when I can get a more consistent number of hands in per month. BetVictor is part of microgaming so same player pool so as long as the software is OK we should be good to go.

Deposited on Party - turns out it's HUDless. I was a little nervous at the start, not being able to exploit people who fold too much to steals, call/fold/4b too much against 3bets etc so easily might take away some edge but I was looking forward to weak tables, especially with it being Sunday. I ended up playing almost exclusively against regulars of varying quality so fingers crossed today was the exception.

Not sure if you can class it as a hero-call but it felt pretty cool at the time.



The next hand I really wasn't sure about, not sure if this is WP or i'm being a super-nit

hello,

Is it bad to bet river small-ish? something like 10-15$? Do you thing avg reg on party is capable of shoving back after his line?

Not playing much this month, but had a lovely session yesterday to get out of red numbers. I am feeling pretty confident at zoom 25. Want to finish my 50K sample there. I think 4K hands to go. After that i'll decide if it is worth to mix zoom 50 again.




Also played one live session last week and ended up +70e.

@Jon-PokerVIP hey mate. Could you delete this and previous post. I kind of didn't realize that i am not in my journey


sorry @Discomfort

Very smooth

I think raising the river small is probably a mistake here - I'm trying to get him to fold his thinish value that beats me - some people will see a small river raise as strong but a lot of people are just going to call it off because it's a good price, i'd rather get more fold equity from villain's top pairs.

I think the tiny raises work best when you think villain is bluffing a tonne, but you don't beat his bluffs so only need minimal fold equity. Also if villain does jam over my raise as a bluff, he deserves my money!

^ ignore that, for some reason I thought I was talking about the hand below....

Really hard to know if betting small is good here. It probably is playing against these villains but I'd be worried about getting bluffraised too often to the point I'm probably calling a raise some percentage of the time.

for some reason my memory lapsed and i thought you were talking about this hand, which I never posted

3 Bet larger and probably fold the river...I don't like the raise here as you don't ever have JK or J8 here so I think you get looked up a bunch