The Evolution of a Poker Player

By aejones

Poker is discovered differently by many individuals. Clearly, if you’re reading this, you’ve received it a specific way. This essay is designed to describe a successful way to go about educating yourself about this game (a ‘method’ that many of you will be able to identify with), the pitfalls to avoid along that path, and what you can expect in the future.

Although there are a variety of ways to go about discovering the game, including dreams of wanting to become the next half-witted accountant from Tennessee with a weight problem to make seven figures, there are specific channels to go about educating yourself on it. After many of you found poker and decided you wanted to get better at it, you picked up a poker book at your local bookstore. This book was in all likelihood terrible (with the exception of Super System), but nevertheless an integral part of your poker career. You learned about pot odds, or how to squeeze out an extra bet with two pair playing 3-6 limit, where the only person who can beat the rake in that game is Jerry Yang. Basic concepts, but fairly important ones nonetheless. Through these books, you learned to play tight. Tight was right. It worked. You might have won some money in home games or online- it seemed fairly simple enough, no one else was folding enough, so by folding a lot and only playing strong hands, you would have an advantage.

If you really got more hungry, you searched Google for poker articles, or read excerpts by Phil Hellmuth or Daniel Negreanu from their websites. For me, Daniel Negreanu was my most important teacher before I was any good at poker. He was one of the few people 3 or 4 years ago that actually went through some thought process fairly publicly, and I benefited greatly from knowing how he thought. To this day, I believe that if/when I play with DN, I’ll have a huge advantage recalling his thought process from hands I read over and over back in the day (without him knowing the information I’m using). These kinds of things will help the average railbird, and might even assist you to winning low stakes NL online, or even tournaments, but it’s not nearly enough to win online. Thus, you reach the first milestone in your poker career.

Milestone #1: Poker is not played inside of a box, if you want to surpass the fgators’ of the world, you need to learn to think outside of it.

Around this time you start thinking about things other than your cards. You realize that other people have cards too! What if you could figure out what they have? A novel concept, indeed, and one that many players have not come into contact with yet. Second and third level thinking come into the picture, and you get excited about poker. You realize there are all sorts of player types, and you should try to cater to the way they play (tight in loose games, loose in tight games) instead of imposing your impressive will of folding in an already nitty game, or splashing around with bottom pairs and draws when no one is folding second pair on any street for any bet.

You learn about Gabe’s girlfriend Shania- I can do anything as long as I balance! You likely overvalue balance, which in time you will learn to de-value, and then value highly again.

This is around the time most of us learn how to play LAG as well. When you learn the nuances of playing loose and aggressive and the effects of your image on the table, you are brought into a whole new world of poker. Everything looks and tastes different than it did before. Suddenly, you’re looking to fillet a different kind of fish- a TAGfish, specifically. You realize your image can effect others into making awful plays. Hell, we all see how bad people play against Poly Baller. You learn to play draws super fast- anytime you can get it in with more outs than you have fingers on one hand, you’ve done alright! Hello fold equity! Anytime I go all in, I’ll just be like ‘fold equity, fold equity, fold equity’- it’s a chant to the poker gods.

You make this transition over and over again. You get aggressive, get tight, get loose, get tight, get loose, get tight. People change their ideal style based on what is sexy at the time, and eventually settle on something that fits their personality. When you’re loose and losing, you blame it on the loose leaks. When you’re tight and losing, you complain about not getting enough action. The human brain is constantly conditioning itself to be results oriented and doubt anything that doesn’t work at the moment. We’ll likely revisit this transition later in our poker careers.

A note about discovering LAG play. It is at this moment that Grimmstar shot off from the standard evolution of a poker player. He moved straight up from this first milestone, stunted his growth in poker, and became a terrible, terrible high stakes player. The man burned nearly a million dollars, true story. There are other examples about players who left here to success- for instance, I think cts and jman had fairly instant successs at higher stakes. They were lucky enough to move up and run good, but wise enough to learn along the way. If you are fortunate enough to run good at 25-50 and continue to ask questions, study game theory, and be open to moving down anytime you hit a bad run- then you’re clearly smart enough to ‘learn on the fly’ and discover other milestones in your poker career as they come.

Oftentimes, the period before this next milestone is characterized by a great humbling at the poker tables. Downswings from playing too fancy and getting your ass handed to you by regulars will lead to low confidence. Usually a shot goes wrong or you just start experiencing extreme variance, running 50 buy ins below expectation in back to back months, perhaps. It all causes you to retool your game, and hopefully, have this epiphany.

Milestone #2: Playing the hand in the fanciest manner does not necessarily equate to making the most money.

This was by far the most difficult concept for me to understand. I spent the greater part of a year worrying about how loose and aggressive I could play, and checking the size of my dick every time I showed a bluff. I’m not sure at what point I came to understand that you could play “straightforward” and be extremely successful. I guess I could think of a few examples… I remember one time I was taking a shot at 25-50 on about a 50k roll, with a friend having some of my action (probably a quarter). I was playing straightforward, and after about 50 hands I was looking at my PAHUD and it said this player was like 15/12 preflop… I won’t mention who it was (not a 2+2er) but I asked one of my friends who played high stakes- and he said this guy is the BEST 25-50 player on the internet. How can he be the best playing 15/12? That baffled me.

Around here you will learn a very valuable lesson that aggression post flop is not the same as aggression preflop, and although they are inevitably related, they are not a direct product of each other. Some people like to LAG it up pre, and then a flop c-bet is as far as they go aggression-wise. They’re easy to float, easy to bluff-raise, easy to 3-bet pre. In general, their upfront aggression is strong, but their backdoor aggression is pedestrian.

(re: upfront vs. backdoor aggression. I’ve been using these terms with friends of mine for a while now, but I just realized that it might not be standard lingo on here. Upfront aggression is basically betting with the lead, lots of c-bets and obvious second barrels; Backdoor aggression is basically tricky stuff- turn check raises, river check raises, leading the turn without initiative, etc. Some players have absolutely no backdoor aggression, while I had been using entirely too much of it for most of my poker career- before the second milestone).

Regardless, once you learn about stats like WWSF and just general dogfights for flops that you know you both missed, you will have real battles with other regulars. A lot of you write posts in MSNL that say “Tough battle vs. reg with history.”

I call horse****.

Most of you are standard 19/17 TAGs and your only ‘battle’ with regs are “zomg, one time he called me down with third pair- an ace peeled the river, but he still called!” In most of these cases, it’s super standard without real history. Most of you haven’t seen history. I remember Ansky and irockhoes played a hand months ago where they got it on 4-bet on the flop with KQ on J high dry. THAT is a hand with history. Guy bet-calls AQ high on the river, THAT is a hand with history. Most of what you guys play is just crappy, obvious aggression, no offense.

As soon as I learned how you could play relatively straightforward and just add some tricks up your sleeve (when you image warrants you getting away with it) I instantly became a better player. If you all haven’t graduated from the whole “2+2 says I should be super tricky in agro” stage of your careers, hopefully you found this past section very insightful. The next milestone, however, is by far the most important in any players career.

Milestone #3: The realization that TheWorstPlayer is awful at poker.

Okay, that was a bit harsh. It was the most concise way to say this: At some point in your career you will be humbled. If you reach this stage, you’ve likely been humbled many, many times. There are, however, spots where you should gain extreme confidence. Times when the heavens open up to you and you are being spoken to by the poker gods’ themselves. Perhaps when you make your first sick ace high call down (or in Gabe’s case, your first king or queen high call down), or you bluff (or 3-bet bluff) the river for the first time successfully. Eventually, however, you will learn that not everyone on 2+2 is good at poker. You will realize that quantity does not equal quality and that high post counts are more a function of boredom than wisdom.

This is where you try to find your niche. All great players are not made the same. Most of us come from different backgrounds and therefore employ different thought processes. You realize that you also have a valid opinion, and maybe you don’t agree with someone like Jason Strasser on a hand- but that’s okay, neither does durrrr! Point being, not everyone can play the same, so at this point in your poker career you gain a great deal of confidence. Maybe you start posting in HSNL more regularly, maybe your opinion is well received; alternatively, if you get to this stage too quickly, you need to have a strong self-confidence to survive it. I’ve been trying to surpass this milestone for 3 years. Mostly, I was humbled by players that were better than me (at the time, and still) by posting in HSNL. I didn’t have experience, but I had ambition. If you have thick skin and an open mind, this can be a strong learning experience. If you don’t, it can be confidence-shattering enough to induce people to quit the game.

This is the milestone around most people in MSNL struggle- most, in fact, may never ‘conquer’ this stage. Most will find MSNL grinding to be satisfying enough.

(note: reading this does not mean you’ve passed the third milestone, you have to realize it for yourself)

Once you realize everyone sucks, you’ll start to see it everywhere. In fact, there are winning 10-20 and 25-50 players, regulars, who are very bad. They do most things as good as a 3-6 player, but game select like a 100-200 player, perhaps. Seeing is believing. Maybe these guys aren’t that good!

You see certain players playing a lot of hours high stakes- he must be good!

You see Dario Mineri’s Sharkscope- he must be good!

You see Phil Hellmuth’s bracelets- he must be good!

If you can get past those three statements, your chances of succeeding in poker will increase exponentially.

The final Milestone is one that I’ve only recently come to discover.

Milestone #4: There’s more to life than poker.

A truer statement could have never been written. During nearly this entire maturation process, most of us who strive to ‘be the best’ were obsessed to some degree. I know you sat in freshman composition class, did not read the assigned chapters the previous night, and did math problems with win rates and tried to figure out how much money you were going to make this week, this month, and this year. I know if you ever took the time to learn equity calcs that you sat in the back of algebra and figured out how much fold equity you needed preflop to 4-bet shove Ax in a bvb battle. I know you skipped your 8am chemistry class because you were up until 6am getting unstuck.

We all know that.

This is the moment when you realize that there is a certain burnout point in the game, and in order to achieve maximum success you need to play quality hands, not a minimum quantity. Here is where you will decrease the number of tables you play and increase your reads on the regulars in the game. Many use this milestone to better their social life, spend more time with their family, increase their exercise regiment. The fact is that many of us live unhealthy, we spend all of the time that we used to on athletics and our family sitting in front of a computer and reading a stupid website with ingenious posters like aejones. The more endorphins you can release through exercise or sex or something, the better decisions you will make. The fact is that this website, these forums, they feel like a fraternity- we laugh together at reef, we cry together at ddubious.

Get past the internet, get past the 45/12 on your right, and improve your life. Only by doing so will you ever improve your poker game.

In summary, many of us will cycle between loose-aggressive and straightforward. We will repeat this cycle many times until we reach a happy medium. We will second guess this medium, rightfully so, because it will be wrong. We will change styles again, doubt ourselves, rightfully so, because again we will be wrong. We will repeat this process over and over again. The best have found their niche; the best understand their place in the poker universe.

Cliffnotes: There are no cliff notes you ****ing underachieving sloth. Read it, I took the time to write it, so you can take the time to read it.

Variance

seriously. fuck off.

200 Rush

Not much to say about it besides from the fact I'm crushing it.
Made a vid:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/awqdc7

Life Update

yo whaddap

Haven't been playing much since April as I got promoted and had to take a financial qualification exam in June. Now that the exam's over and the promotion has gone fine, I'll be having more time to play. I've been getting back in playing 4-8 tables of 100nl, mainly cos I'm a bankroll nit and had to withdraw some spending money.

I've realised RB is same for 8 tabling as 4 tables of rush. So I've been playing a lot of RUSH. And it's been amazing.













As you can see, I'm still below EV! but it's cool as I've kinda run well too.

But I've realised I'm playing much better and picking better spots to cbet or spots where I should give up. Also, I've discovered spots where I can exploit capped ranges and fuck with people's heads when I have a nut hand by super polarising my range to get them to herocall.

One of the examples was this one:

Full Tilt No-Limit Hold'em, $1.00 BB (6 handed) - Full-Tilt Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com



CO ($100)

Button ($116.45)

SB ($89.20)

BB ($154)

UTG ($287.05)

Hero (MP) ($154.40)



Preflop: Hero is MP with Q, Q

UTG bets $3, Hero calls $3, 4 folds



Flop: ($7.50) 5, 2, Q (2 players)

UTG checks, Hero bets $6, UTG calls $6



Turn: ($19.50) 2 (2 players)

UTG checks, Hero bets $14, UTG calls $14



River: ($47.50) 5 (2 players)

UTG checks, Hero bets $60, UTG calls $60



Total pot: $167.50 | Rake: $3



Results:

UTG had 3, A (two pair, fives and twos).

Hero had Q, Q (full house, Queens over fives).

Outcome: Hero won $164.50


Another thing that's clicked for me is when players do things when they polarise their range either through their betting size or pattern and a very weak holding that I have can be equivalent to a much stronger looking hand:
Full Tilt No-Limit Hold'em, $1.00 BB (6 handed) - Full-Tilt Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com



Button ($72.75)

Hero (SB) ($128)

BB ($103.15)

UTG ($113.75)

MP ($494.75)

CO ($120.95)



Preflop: Hero is SB with K, A

4 folds, Hero bets $4, BB calls $3



Flop: ($8) 2, 9, 5 (2 players)

Hero bets $5, BB calls $5



Turn: ($18) 9 (2 players)

Hero checks, BB bets $10, Hero calls $10



River: ($38) 7 (2 players)

Hero checks, BB bets $30, Hero calls $30



Total pot: $98 | Rake: $3



Results:

Hero had K, A (one pair, nines).

BB had Q, 10 (one pair, nines).

Outcome: Hero won $95


In this hand, it's bvb and villain flats flop bets turn. As I feel he can be floating this flop quite often I call turn with AK. On the river, his sizing and betting pattern polarises his hand to 9x/22/55/77 and a ton of air that floated so my hand turns into AA and can comfortably snap off his bluff.

Random thoughts

Read a thread on 2p2, quite interesting:

"First of all, I’d like to dispel some common poker mythology. Everyone has “that friend” that plays poker and has won some arbitrary amount of money playing it online. Fewer people have a friend that actually plays it and wins money regularly. But regardless of which friend we’re talking about, these friends are always stamped with the label of having the ability to make money easily. I mean, look how easy it looks on television. Phil Hellmuth bets the turn for $8500. Phil Ivey raises it to $30,000 and Hellmuth folds. Ivey wins a $46,000 pot, more than the average North American household income. It’s so easy! Not so fast…

Okay so maybe comparing online cash game players to Hellmuth and Ivey is a mistake. But the point I’m trying to make is that to the untrained eye, poker seems like a game where a select few people were simply born with the ability to play it and automatically make money the “easy way” without having a “real job”. Only those that play the game regularly (or once did, and perhaps failed) or are close with someone who does, are informed enough to appreciate that the game is indeed quite difficult and that being a poker player isn’t quite as “easy” as it looks. The game was somewhat difficult in 2004, and its difficulty level with respect to being a profitable player has multiplied since then with thanks to coaching and teaching websites.

The big misconception about poker players is that they are extremely lazy. This mostly stems from the fact that they normally “work” for less hours than the average working class individual and the myth is compounded by their notorious couch-potato behavior when not playing the game. But what people don’t realize is just how intense the common work hour is for a poker player in contrast to that of a typical office job. The online poker player has the amazing opportunity to increase his hourly profit by maximizing the number of tables he plays until he begins approaching the threshold where more tables is too many and actually hamper his profits. (Note that the ability to find this threshold is an important attribute for any successful poker player.) Depending on the game-type, this threshold is typically somewhere in the 400-1000 hand/hour range. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll use 600 hands per hour. This of course results in roughly 10 hands per minute. Or, one hand every 6 six seconds. Many hands can be complicated enough to demand as much as hours of analysis in investigating the optimal strategy to maximize profit in the given situation. So if we consider that hours of thought is commonly being compressed into 6 seconds of intuition during each poker session, we begin to appreciate just how intense the process of playing online poker can be. During a standard two hour session, online poker players have no time to check their e-mail, go to the washroom, watch a youtube clip, check their facebook, or in some cases, go to the bathroom. Nor can they answer the phone, or go to the front door to get the food they had delivered. The point I’m making is that when that guy you know that makes a bunch of money playing online poker tells you he works 15-20 hours a week, that actually converts to a far greater number of hours when considering just how mentally demanding the online poker hour is.

So now you can understand why some poker players have some weeks where they only play 10 hours. Or why they often finish their session to go drink a beer and watch sports instead of dash towards the gym. (Note that in my opinion, keeping active is an important ingredient in achieving full potential career-wise, not just in poker. But not all poker players share the same opinion.) I’m not looking to start a debate, but I would argue that a hard-working online poker grinder expends more mental energy in a given week than a typical 40-50 hour/week office job. But there’s really no way to prove that so it’s a pretty moot point.

This leads into my next argument in defense of the poker player who seems to be living the “easy life”. Being a poker player is stressful. Extremely, stressful. That’s not to say it’s necessarily unhealthily stressful. The key is that the root of the stress a poker player feels ultimately lies in just what their expectations are from their poker career as well as the situation they put themselves into. There’s a constant ongoing struggle for a poker player to find the appropriate stakes to play where his edge is big enough to dilute the variance factor, yet where he is also in the realm of maximizing his profits. Some players tend to lump the ego factor into this decision as well and simply just play for as big of stakes as they feel like they can win at. Other players lie on the other end of the spectrum and grind out the small stakes because they simply can’t stomach the larger downswings that happen at mid-to-high stakes. But regardless of what stakes a player chooses to play, they usually have a ballpark estimate of what their winrate and hourly profits should be. And every poker player walking the Earth has taken that number and extrapolated it to a year’s worth of grinding to figure out what they *should* make this year playing poker. So now we have constructed a goal. And with goals, come stress. The stress of falling short. The stress of not being on track. The stress of moving backwards. The stress of leaving work with less money in your figurative pockets than you had when you arrived at work. I like to think of this stress as the “macro-stress” involved in being a poker player.

For some players, arguably the majority of players, macro-stress pales in comparison to the micro-stress they experience on a daily basis of grinding. As everyone knows, there’s luck involved in poker. And as only a select few people know and fully understand, that luck is really only significant in the short-term. (Note that just like in economics, independent short term factors can ultimately affect long-term factors in some particular circumstances, but we’ll ignore that for now. For clarification, an example would be if a player’s luck is so bad in a short period of time that it affects him mentally and emotionally, it may actually hinder his long-term results even though in theory it shouldn’t. But hey, we’re all human.) In the long-term, players play enough hands that for every time they’ve been unlucky to a certain degree, there’s a paired time where they’ve been lucky to that same degree and voila, the luck factor self-implodes and the actual results converge with expected results. But in the short-term, there is a ton of luck involved. In any given hand where you get all of your money in on a table, unless you have your opponent drawing dead with 0% chance to win, you can lose. And you do. If you get it in as an 80% favourite, you should win that “most of the time”, right? What about three times in a row? (51.2%.. you’re only a slight favourite!) The human mind likes to simplify things in terms of absolutes. It’s difficult to comprehend that when you win a pot that you were an 80% favourite to win, you actually “got lucky”. You “got lucky” to receive that additional 20% of the pot that mathematically belonged to your opponent. But the 20% of the time where he wins 100% of the pot, you get a feeling of “oh my god that’s so unlucky”. Over the course of a session where a player plays thousands of hands, tens of these hands result in all-in pots where the mythological poker gods decide whether you get more or less of the equity you deserve. When you get the short end of the stick and repeatedly have the moments of “ugh I got screwed again”, it generates a level of stress. Each hand you get unlucky in becomes another attack on your mental psyche and unless you make the decision to stop at the nearest sign of running bad, it wears on you. (Note that stopping at the nearest sign of running bad is ultimately only a good decision if you happen to be poor at managing your emotions. But some players would certainly benefit in abiding to such a rule.)

So we have two profound and separate, yet related, sources of stress to deal with as a poker player. Most players most likely have more sources of stress but we’ll stick to the most obvious ones for now. The key component that sets these two stresses apart is simply that one is good, and one is bad. And I feel as though this is something that many poker players struggle with as they might fail to see this contrast and simply deal with all stress similarly.

Micro-stress can be managed and dealt with independently. Some players smash keyboards, other players slam mice, while others go for a run. Personally, I think weightlifting is the ultimate micro-stress reliever and it’s my clear-cut method of choice. Macro-stress, on the other hand, is good stress. In my opinion, it’s a necessary stress. It’s that sense of urgency in search of accomplishment. It’s what drives a person to wake up when their alarm is ringing instead of pressing the snooze button. It’s a good thing. Without it, we can quickly fall victim to poor production and a lack of self-pride. And this in turn, in my experiences, leads to a sense of unhappiness. Not so much unhappiness, but moreso, not as happy as one *could* be. That’s not to say that macro-stress is such a great thing that we should strive to feel it. It’s not a good feeling to have a bad week and feel further away from your monthly goal than you should. The key is to apply the macro-stress in a manner in which you can have more control over it. In the poker sense, this means making more achievable goals instead of ones that rely on luck or other uncontrollable variables. More specifically, I believe its astronomically more productive to set a goal for the number of hands to play or the number of hours to grind over a given period than to attach any sort of monetary figure to it. This way, we feel that urgency to “work” and keep on track, while absorbing negative macro-stress by focusing more on what we can control. It lets a bad session feel more productive in that, at least you got closer to your goal hands-wise or hours-wise."

Life at 200NL

200nl is going ok. Not running very good but still managing to grind out a 1.5ptbb winrate. Including RB that is around 80-100 dollars per hour which is a lot more than what I would have imagined achieving a few months ago.

Decided to cut down on the tables to just 6-8 due to a suggestion from a friend and it is going extremely well. I am finding myself making better folds and better calls as a result of this and really enjoy the grind.

To be honest, I can totally imagine myself playing poker full time and enjoying life without work.

Maybe one day...

1.2K day

WHO'S THE BITCH NOW?

Full Tilt Poker $1/$2 No Limit Hold'em - 6 players

The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter



SB: $425.00

BB: $200.00

UTG: $216.55

MP: $224.45

Hero (CO): $422.55

BTN: $201.75



Pre Flop: ($3.00) Hero is CO with A A

2 folds, Hero raises to $6, 1 fold, SB raises to $19, 1 fold, Hero raises to $62, SB requests TIME, SB raises to $136, Hero raises to $422.55 all in, SB calls $286.55



Flop: ($847.10) K Q J



Turn: ($847.10) 8



River: ($847.10) T



Final Pot: $847.10

SB shows K K (three of a kind, Kings)

Hero shows A A (a straight, Ace high)

Hero wins $844.10

(Rake: $3.00)

Rollercoaster ride at 200nl and 400nl shot

Moved up to 200nl permanently and have been playing quite a lot of hands. I used to table select and choose soft tables but I've recently decided to play any table that's open as I want to play v the regs and anyone to improve my game.

I'm actually 12-tabling right now but I think I'm playing fine. I had a +1.5K session this morning where I ran ok. Don't know what the fuck happened but I ran uber uber bad in a session I played in the evening where I dropped 1.5K back omg. I lost like 8/8 flips and kept getting suckouts and coolers seriously I was like -1.5K below in EV for the whole session. I haven't run very good since moving up to 200nl but I've still been able to grind out a 1.5ptbb/100 win rate. I do hope this improves soon as I feel like I'm completely crushing the tables!

Worth mentioning is a brief shot I took at 400nl today as I was kind of tilted by the nittyness at 200nl.

Managed to get JJ in v player who had 3bet preflop consecutively in the past 5 hands button v SB and obviously he has QQ and holds.

FTP has this run it twice feature and I had it on when my 2nd stack off hand happened, UTG opens and I flat in BB with AKhh. Flop is 7c 3h 2h and I c/r and call shove v 67ss.

We run it twice and I brick both times!

Run soooooooooo good. All in all I played 6 hours today 0 > +1.5K > 0 > -1K

Bigtime below EV, ffs where's the long run?

Up and away

woot I've kinda skipped 100nl and now up to 200nl! Well I did play like 30K hands at 100 but 1 day after dropping 5 buyins, I decided to move up with a 9K+ bankroll

...and dropped another 500 at 200nl making it a -1K day.

I felt really good though and so decided to stay at the level. Been away from poker a while due to moving homes and setting up the internet connection but I'M BACK.

Went to casino 2 days ago at the Empire with colleagues just for jokes and managed to have my first £1K hour! It was a crazy table and my very first hand was the below:

A few limpers including a crazy drunk 50-60 woman who I had seen open raise like 20-30bbs as standard.

I bump it up to 16 with AKcc after 4 limpers and 2 call me while the CDW reraises to 120, I shove and she snaps with 9Thh!

Heart attack flop 7h 8h 5c turn 4c river 5s ship ship 500 pounds in my stack.

A few hands later I pick up QQ UTG and make it 10 3 callers and tight passive on BTN with 100 stack makes it 25. I was going to fold but CDW in BB makes it 125 and has 200 behind. To just profit from her, I decided to shove my QQ. At this point, I'm feeling tad hot and stressed so I stand up and walk 2 steps away from my seat as I've shoved already so I can take a breath and chill out. Dealer and everyone at the table says that this makes my hand dead! OMG! I call for floor for ruling and luckily he says it's fine. Apparently there's a rule saying you can't leave your seat or else your hand is dead.

Anyway, after that scary 5 minutes, tight passive obv calls and has KK and CDW snaps with A6o

Another heart attack board! J22 turn is ACE! but nooooooooooooo river BANG Q! I ship 850+ pot bringing my stack up to 900+.

Few hands later shortstack UTG opens and I flat behind with AJhh as does CDW in BB.

Flop Jc 3h 6s and CDW donks 100 into 30, UTG calls for whatever rest of his stack was and as CDW has 300 behind I just make it 400 and she snaps.

Turn is amazing card for me 2h and river is decent 2c and I ship another 800 pot bringing my stack to 13xx.

I get a few drinks for my colleagues and cash out even though the CDW keeps rebuying. Sucks but I had to head home for dinner or else I'd be spanked by my mum.

Went to the cashier and they gave him a wad of 20 pound notes wrapped with a paper band in between! Just like those bricks you see on High Stakes Poker! Except the fact that they're 100 dollar notes and they have like 1000 of them to make a brick of 100K...but I don't care!

So all in all I bought in for 250 and cashed out 1335 with a profit of £1085 in 1 hour!

Epicness. The very next day (yesterday) my internet gets connected and I get home and continue where I left off! 200NL...

BOOM 1K day. I chase back all losses prior to the internet connection being turned off and establish myself as a rising 200nl reg who will terrorise the mid-stakes....

Well obviously at the very very end of my session I lose 150bbs in set over set but what can you do...I finish session up 700 but I check the clock and it's past midnight! So strictly speaking it's still a 1K day!

Midstakes here I come.

GRADUATED FROM MICRO STAKES

I can successfully say I've graduated from micro stakes and I have made a brag/tips post on 2p2 about it. Here's the link:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/69/micro-stakes-pl-nl/how-progress-micros-into-ssnl-691135/

Actually pretty generic stuff but I don't care.

I'm fucking done with micros.

to 100nl and beyond

I've moved up to 100nl following a successful month in december. I have also decided to stick to Full Tilt due to the weak connection PokerStars has, as well as the fact that the increased benefits of maintaining Supernova < guaranteed rakeback on Full Tilt + better interface.

I now have a 8.5K+ roll and will consider taking shots at 1/2 once I hit 10K. I'm a bit of a bankroll nit but it's working for me so I don't care what anyone else says.

I am hand-reading really well and picking my spots a lot better. My leaks still include being a pay off wizard and allowing session results affect my decisions. For example, as I like ending up for a session, I may give up on a +EV decision to "lock in" the win for the session. Or I may end the session early just to finish in the green.

I definitely need to improve on that as I would like to be able to grind more after work each day.

Goals for 2010: become 200 or 400NL reg, 50K in winnings before end of year.