long night session
4 hours, 1200 hands 7,2BB/100

1st 600 hands of the session I ran like a god. next 400 were ok... i kept my cool... last 200 were a clear: you should have gone to bed I became tired and made some questionable decisions.

over all I ran great today... I made some very bad calls. Lots to analyze tomorrow

night session, 3 hours, 800 hands -7BB/100 because I am just a big moron.

I really played bad in adittion to not having good cards (of 15 AK I hit the board once... grml)

I also fucked up the very last hand otherewise it would have been a break even session.

grmpf

fiiiiine afternoon session

2,5 hours, 1000 hands +48BB/100

I got paid alot. I even got my biggest single win ever

today 2 month ago I joined PokerVIP, today 2 month ago I started my new journey.

Today my bonusperiod at bet365 ran out and therefor it is time for a quick recap....

start 50€
after 10k hands I was at -40€ (only the clearing of the first deposit bonus made it possible that i could keep 4tabling. At one point i could not rebuy to the max amount on the table)
highest point was €117 (about 300 hands ago)
finish at €110

including rakeback and clearing the bonus: €165

so I trippled my bankroll within 2 months. I played 41k Hands and about 140 hours. --> keeping in mind that i have a full time job beside in my own company and need time to study and review I think this is respectable. I started 4 tabling and improved to 6 tabling during this journey. now i find it easier to 6 table because there is no time do get distracted and it is easier to let go of marginal hands.

some goals I set before starting here I only acomplished partly. I constructed my own preflop range (including 3betting and calling range) in order to increase my 3bet% and nit up preflop. Adopting to the playerpool this was not profitable. I had to get rid of my 3bet bluffs as fish call with anything and you have very little fold equity. Additionally I still have a 6%points gap between VPIP and PFR. I actually wanted to shrink it to 2-3% but against my fellow fish at Bet365 calling is higher EV than 3betting (especially as sooooo many players play short stacked)

The stats i cannot life with at the moment are my W$WSF which is tooo low at 42% and my FCbet which is too low at 52% (especcially from EP - 42%). I am not focussing on my redline any more - which is some kind of reliev, on the other hand I still think that my rather low agression is a major leak.

Focussing on agression I do not want to harm my biggest strength which is extracting value. I became more and more confident to bet bigger and even overbet my fish and get lots of € from them.

Right at the beginning and in the 3rd quater of my journey I struggled really hard. I got lost in frustration and played bad. Big thanks to all of you who took the time and read my blog and gave me some word of encouragement. Special thanks to @AshVIP and @Pwll as I really hit rock bottom when you encouraged me to keep improving and staying in the game!!

Next steps are probably finding an new site where I can clear a 100€ deposit bonus I hope i find some place as fishy as Bet365 wich is also eligable for the monthly PokerVIP. As i start 6tabling i might be able to collect enough rake in the forseeable future to grind some extra bucks.

Great to hear! I've enjoyed reading this so far, and it does show the ups and downs that all players go through and that you just need to keep playing through the downswings and frustration!

Have you played on BetFair before?

Same network as Bet365, so generally the same players. Also 35% rakeback, our PokerVIP challenge (8%++), deposit bonus (20%) and a €100 "Bankjob Bonus" every month (10%) so lots of returns as you can see!

Click Here to sign up

Dunno why the link isn't showing lol

Copy and paste this:

http://ads.betfair.com/redirect.aspx?pid=2505755&bid=9212

Thanks for the tip... Betfair was my favourite and i created a new acount there.

The players are not as fishy as at Bet365 but it is still worth my while.

2hours, 900 hands, +31BB/100

I am pretty satisfied with this session, although my agression could be a bit higher. (as always)

I will post 2 hands in the review section.

2nd day on betfair, 2nd day of good poker

I nearly could copy the score of yesterday: 2hours, 950 hands and +29BB/100 so far Betfair is quite good to me.

At the moment I feel very good in my game. I had a weak phase for about 150 hands where I became too passive but recovered (this happened directly after I could not decide to call down an aggro villain or not and folded on the river after I invested already 2€ in the pot. But other than that I was very happy with my game.

Agression gets better. It is a bit easier here to be agressive as the playerpool is much nitier than on bet365 so there is much more fold equity.

Slowly I start thinking about stepping up to NL10. At least this is something I really would like to achieve this year. I think about mixing one NL10 table into my sessions. I really want to have a smooth transition. I guess I will start doing this when I have a roll about 200€ so 20Buy ins and try to change completly when I have about 25buy ins. Do you think that this is a good plan or should I build up my roll a bit further (30buy ins+) At the moment I feel pretty competent at my level and I do not think that there is a big step between NL4 and NL10.

Well this is nothing I have to decide today or tomorrow but it feels good to be much closer to stepping up the ladder an not thinking about reducing to NL2.

as I registered new at Betfair i got some twistertickets for free... Result: Obviously I am a cash-player... I scored 0/6
Reviewing the session I did not really play bad although I do not feel comfortable when I am so short stacked.

EV is nearly positive, but i literally lost 8/8 coin flips I do not think that this kind of variance is good for me and my mental game so I will only play twisters when I get free tickets

back to the cash tables!!

Nightsession
105 minutes, 850 hands +20BB/100

feels good to rock the cash games.

I made some questionable decisions, but i will go into this after an extensive review session.

I wish you all a nice weekend and cu on monday!

Nightsession
I played nearly 3 hours 1300 Hands +12,89BB/100

session started extremly bad. after bit more than 300 hands I was down 3 buy ins. I stacked off 2 times and lost some pots...

I got back up to about -1,25 buyins only to drop back down to -3buy ins after 800 hands.

It was the first time at Betfair that I got wrecked left right and center. But i kept my cool and kept playing a rather good game. 500 hands later i finished 1,3 buy ins up.

I am really happy with this session. I did not lose my head and i kept my cool. I also applyied lots of pressure in some situations so my red is very acceptable. I am getting more and more confident in calling down the maniacs even with mediocre hands and made some 4bet bluffs - actually after analyzing my hands I only 4bet bluffed, never for value as no such spot occured

Afternoon session
2 hours, 1021 hands +3,77BB/100

as yesterday the session started very bad. lost a stack because i was greedy and my TPTK got wrecked by a set.

i am not very happy with some of the hands I played but over all it was a good session. I clawed my way back and was very agressive. I can only repeat myself... playerpool is completly different to Bet365. here are way more nits but no really strong players and some fish. Over at Bet365 loads of fish and whale, and plenty of good regs (at least for NL4) nothing in between. As a result I managed to have a positive red

very wierd nightsession

2.5 hours, 1129 hands and +4,3BB/100

on one table I had a maniac next to my left. He bet like crazy. so I bit my time and waited for strong enough hands to call him down. He always had me... really always. so I sunk lots of money into this guy as I am betting and overbetting those guys to get value.

In the end I managed to be positive, but this was the 3rd session in a row where I was nearly the whole session in the reds and managed to climb above 0 in the end.

again there is a hand going to be in the review section.

tomorrow i plan only to play 1 session as i have some work to do and i will focus on reviewing today.

Dear friends of the blog,

Nice quick session at betfair
80minutes, 647 hands and +30,8BB/100

I really played my A-game today. There were two situation where I should react differently (in both cases I did not take the nittyness of my opponent into account) Other than that I played very good. Very agressive against passive players, and max value against fish

additionally a nice rungood does help as well. I also had 2 AI with AK. 1 won against QQ and lost against JJ

Friday night session

2 hours, 1002 hands and +17,39BB/100

again I played good poker. after about 650 hands I got tired and lost my edge a little bit. I became too passive and did not play well. It needed 30 crazy hands to get me going again.
In these 30 hands I dropped from +150BB down to -50BB and back up to +150BB.

6 tabling is working perfectly. I will stick to this setup for a while!

tomorrow I have a whole saturday time for reviewing my sessions and my difficult spots and play a bit more. I hope I can put in 2 sessions tomorrow.

How long do you find you can play your A-game for before needing a break?
I play for much longer than I should if the game is good but I should take breaks every 45 minutes maximum.

Hey @Pwll I found that 2 hours is a very good session length for me. During this time I do not take any breaks - at least no planned ones.

A skill I developed over the last few months is listening to my body, or better my brain. When you scroll through my blog you will find that i oscillate around the 2 hours mark. when I feel good I play longer, when I dont I stop earlier.

something that I had to acknowledge yesterday is that I also have to take care of physical tiredness. I started working at 8a.m and finished at 9p.m... after such a long day a two hours session was too long. I became tired and lost my edge.

A good sign for me to stop is when I am content with my results. I stop pushing because I am afraid to lose some money. This is an immediate exit sign for me. Another sign is that I get bored in the sense that I just dont feel like playing poker and rather do something else.

On the other hand when I am still hungry and really not interested in something else at all a session can take up to 4 hours. Tables are good, I am happy with what I am doing--> why should I stop.

Afternoon session

well the correction had to come sometime:

3hours, 1244 hands and -20BB/100

Actually I felt very well this afternoon so I decidet to take a stab at NL10. My roll was over 200€ so i thought I could take the risk. unfortunatly i did not do so well. and lost 1,5 buy ins. which is actually nearly exactly the loss of this session. I stacked off with a silliy bluff, well that can happen. The other half was due tu being to passive

on the NL4 tables I played ok.

For the next sessions I will keep playing at NL4 until I am over 20BuyIns for NL10 and try to take another stab.

You could try doing 5 buy in shots. Might take a bit longer to get there, but when you have €250 you have 5 buy ins over the €200 that you are kind of using as your benchmark and stop loss. Play 10NL at that point and stay playing it until you drop below €200. If you don't drop below then you keep going.

Also don't get so hung up on I am 4NL or 10NL(not saying you do) I think you already know this cuz I have seen something before, but you can mix tables. If there is a juicy 4NL table just play it, doesn't matter. Being able to play across multiple stakes just means you can table select even more and give yourself the best odds to be playing against fish. If the table sucks and is full of regs just dump it and find something else you will have so much to choose from.

When I made the jump from 10NL to 20NL, I didn't use this type of aggressive bankroll management. I was a bit more conservative and didn't even do shot taking. Just waited until I had a certain amount of buy ins at the new level and will probably do the same moving forward. I also did this cuz I wanted to make sure I was even beating 10NL, but I think you are beating 4NL handily and using a more aggressive approach is probably better as long as you are doing what you are doing and using a move down number etc. This will allow you to increase your bankroll faster. From what I have seen the difference in skill level and amount of fish between the first few levels of micros is not that major anymore.

Good luck. Been meaning to show you a graph of some 2NL Zoom I have been messing around with. I wanted to show you the red line and how far down it was and how much it didn't really matter. Having a good red line is all well and good, but the overall winrate is all that matters in the end and sometimes at the micros you have to sacrifice one for the other

@fawltyfelix as always thank you so much for taking the time and not only following my blog but also writing those feedback posts. This is very much appreciated.

My plan regarding stepping up to NL10 is exactly what you mention in your 2nd paragraph. I know that having only 20 buyins is way to agressive, especially as I am 6tabling. So I plan to mix in one very juicy looking NL10 table into 5 NL4 tables. I do this because I need some time in order to get used to the much higher amounts of money in play (2,5 times as much) A normal 3bet at NL10 looks like a massive 4bet at NL4.

reviewing my NL10 hands from this afternoon showed me that this could become a huge problem. I was sooooo intimidated by those higher amounts and afraid of losing money that I did not play well (foldet AK to a squeez, because I was to afraid to squeez myselfe in the first place)

from what I have seen the playerpool is exactly the same. so I am not really afraid that I cant deal whith the level skillwise. But mentally this is another story and thats the reason why I prefer the tiptoe aproach.

I do not get hung up on a particular stake lvl. Although I consider stake lvls like football league lvls I play what my skill lvl and bankroll allow. I have the feeling that I beat NL4 now and I just want to face a new challenge. I am definitly not trying to force it and i have shown in the past that i am not too proud to demote myselfe to a lower lvl if my bankroll becomes to small.

regarding my redline: I do not get annoyed with it as much as I used to. Changing the poker site showed me how much the red line is depended on the playerpool. Bet365 had sooooo many unbluffable fish, that the red line had to be massivly negativ. Betfair has fewer fish but more nits.
In the bigger picture I tend to be way to passive when I am not fully focussed on the game. Therefor a rapidly downwards sloping red line shows me that in this paritcular session I did not fight for my pots enough and played to much fit or fold. As long as my green is steadily running upwards I am fine though