Hello guys!

Last couple weeks were about studying a lot, trying to fix biggest leaks I have, increase and decrease certain frequencies based on some MDA work and less about grinding. When it comes to grinding we are moving up stakes and feeling more and more confident doing so. Some stuff I was working a lot on last couple weeks are:

- bvb spots (from SB perspective)
- turn c-bet and river arriving range on both bb and bx nodes
- BB vs IP

There is a lot of take-aways from MDA work that was done, that unfortunately I can't share, but what I can say is that people are better than I thought.

Work has been done, frequencies are getting closer to where I want them to be, the only thing that is missing is results, but as we all know it's a process and the results will be there eventually if we keep doing what we are doing. 

I identified (with much appreciated help with others) some mindset problems I had. Most of it is pretty low self-esteem and undervaluing myself. This will need time to get fixed, we are in for a journey, but I think I will get there sooner or later. What was quite funny to notice is that, I'm not the only person having problems with that, and it seems like players that spend a lot of time off tables have lower belief in themselves compared to the ones studying very little. It makes sense, as why would you think about your skill negatively if you just don't know what you don't know :)

After Grindhouse 3

Last 30 days

I'm still too tight on higher stakes, which is showing in the red line loses. We need to grow bigger balls and stop being afraid of stronger opponents.

BLACK FRIDAY SALE - extended

We decided to extend our Black Friday sale until Friday 2 December 2022. Get that value!

Santa Mammoth - promo

Christmas is approaching pretty quickly and before I go to Prague for Eureka/EPT, I decided that I will turn myself into Santa Claus and I will do free seminar on Friday 2nd December 2022. It will be 30 mins long and open for everyone to join. This way, you can see for yourself how our seminars are hosted. Topic is still unknown, but it's very likely we will review some hands that I've tagged. 

We will be running give-aways on Discord soon. You can win multiple things, such as free video or even entry to one of our live sessions. Stay tuned!

Mammoth On Twitch.

Speaking of give-aways, there is more! You can win 1 week access to seminars if you are lucky enough in the raffle on Twitch.

​I will be on Twitch with Tiimeeyyy on Thursday and Ole will be live with Deckflow on Friday this week. More deitals on Discord in #events Good luck!

​Hello guys, it's been a while!

LAB
I've been very busy working on my game lately and didn't have much time to be active on discord and no time to post an update in here.

During Grindhouse and after I got my game broken down into pieces and found very specific leaks in some areas that I wasn't even aware of. Long story short, I was still too passive, mainly preflop and too loose postflop from turns in both calling and c-betting myself. I created a study plan for myself and I'm working hard on fixing every leak from the list these days. I can't discuss this in detail and I don't want to expose myself too much, but what we figured out is that I was still too passive in check-raising, flatting IP and from SB as well as still 3-betting too little. Frequencies look fine, but we can be overly aggressive in certain situations preflop and on certain board textures postflop as well. 

Studying and fixing those leaks and learning pretty exploitative strategies is my main focus at the moment, and I'm pretty certain I will get there sooner or later. It's very interesting how little deviation from optimal population need to do in order for us to become very aggro. I strongly believe I can get the red line winnings to break-even or possibly even positive without hurting blue line too much. This is EV graph after 20 Sept, which is the end of the Grindhouse 3. We are currently performing at -1.87bb/100 in red line overall. Very small sample size, as I only had 18 grinding days, so I don't want to say it yet, but I think I'm on the right track :)

BUNDLES
I finally created my own bundles from seminars I did this year. I selected multiple videos and decided to go for two packages - IP and OOP bundle. Let me know if interested and if you have any questions about the content. 

​GRINDHOUSE episodes
are uploaded and premiere every week. We are already on Episode 6. If you haven't watched any yet, there is a link to EP6: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ23Cc514iQ


POKERCODE HALOWEEN promo
Pokercode is running Halloween promo now that you should definitely check out. Prometheus (multiway training app that we've been using during Grindhouse) gets added to all subscriptions. 
www.pokercode.com/blog/get-prometheus-for-free-during-our-halloween-promotion

WCOOP is finally over (except the main that got re-scheduled) and so is my Grindhouse 3 experience. Being in the house was great! I had a blast and can't wait for youtube content to be realised. Episode 1 should be up later this week. 

I will very likely do a much longer post about the whole experience and take-aways and about my WCOOP, but for now you can watch the seminar I did this Monday with Fabi on 'Our main take-aways from GH3'. It's available to watch for our seminar subscribers, but also (as all videos are) available to purchase for $15. There is a lot of golden nuggets in there, so I'd totally recommend. 

Speaking of seminars...

As mentioned already, we give you a chance to purchase single videos now for $15 per video. You can find the list of all seminars in #full-month-seminars on my Discord. 

Additionally, I'd like to remind you that the WCOOP promotion is still going and will end on October 1st. You still have 3 days left to sub to our seminars for $100. If you do that, you will be paying $100 until the end of 2022 as our current subscribers are. If you sub from October, you will be charged $125. 

By the way, depending on what day Episode 1 is realised, we may or may not have a 'watch party' on Discord open for everyone. The idea is to watch it together and have a chat as well. I will update you on this later this week.

I will also summarise my WCOOP/GH3 in next blog post in couple days when I'm done re-scheduling my week and building 3-6-12 month plan for myself. There is a lot that I'd like to change and a lot to blog about.

​Stay tuned! 

Hello guys!

Last month have been packed with coaching and studying my game a lot to be max prepared for WCOOP grind and Grindhouse 3. I've identified many leaks in my thought processes and did in depth DB analysis to filter out my leaks that I will be focusing on plugging in next couple weeks. Biggest one being pretty low probe bet % still, which is quite surprising as I thought I play those spots quite ok. 

Main findings from studies were how sensitive I should be to bet sizings and also I feel like I have better understanding in which spots we should be overfolding and against which positions and on what runouts we need to be hero calling like there is no tomorrow. It comes down to value to bluff ratios that people have pretty poor understanding off in certain situations imo.

On top of that I decided to spend some time during Grindhouse 3 and after on building and simplifying preflop strategies as well as build a database of sims from the scratch. I would like to have access to solutions with sizings that I am using in game and with some limitations in gametree for my opponents as well. 

Not many games played, but I'm still happy with my volume:study ratio. I also added ACR to the schedule. Their tournaments have very good structure as you are playing pretty deep, but the games also take forever with 5 hour long re-entry period. Not great for us Europeans. 

The goal for series is to take it slow this time. Will play 8-12 tables max, focusing on quality over quantity. I would like to improve as much as I can while playing and see if I enjoy the process of grinding more than normal. There will be a lot of hours played in next couple weeks mostly because of Grindhouse, so going for 12-20 tabling when we need to play every day can result in decision-making fatigue that leads to burnout. 

Speaking of Grindhouse, I really liked the 'homework' Fedor gave us that was about drilling spots in GTOW. It was meant to prepare us a little and we were asked to screenshot every mistake and save it in google doc for him. I guess we will see what this was for while in the house. I definitely learnt a lot while doing those drills and realized how poor my strategy is in 3-bet pots OOP. This and all OOP spots in general are on priority list to study the most often right now. 

I'm very excited for the Grindhouse! Flying to Vienna tomorrow already. We will grab dinner on Thursday and Friday and on Saturday morning we are already leaving to the house. Road trip time with Pokercode crew! :)

Best of luck to everyone during series!  

Hello guys! 
Couple announcements for you. 
- WCOOP sale and Mammoth Seminars changes
- Pokercode Back 2 School sale
​- Free seminar
- DTO affiliate program

MAMMOTH SEMINARS WCOOP SALE
Let me start with our seminars. If you haven't seen the post I did 2 days ago, there it is:

Let me know if you have any questions. Also, don't forget to get your free trial if you would like to have a peek at our work! More on that later in this post. 

POKERCODE: BACK 2 SCHOOL SALE
Pokercode is also running a Back 2 School promotion for a limited time

MAMMOTH SEMINARS: FREE SEMINAR
​If you are uncertain and can't decide if joining Mammoth Seminars is a good idea, we are still offering a free session for you guys. If you haven't taken a free trial yet, now is the time! 

A lot of value in this offer as you can select from tons of sessions done in the past or join us live to get max experience!

DTO PROMO CODE
Most of you should be aware of this one already, but as this post is about sales and promotions I decided to give you a reminder.

Big value if you are a subscriber to Mammoth Seminars, as you can get DTO 3-way for FREE. It's the only 3-way trainer out there that I am familiar with. Totally recommend!

Last couple months have been all about Pokercode. More on that later in this post. 

• summer = good weather = no playing or very little playing

Very little grinding for me in the last 2 months. I was at a music festival for a week, and most summer days I've been enjoying being outside, hanging out with friends. I also had a lot of things piled up on the to-do list, and the list got so long that I needed to spend a couple days on those tasks.

• study

I'm really happy with my study routines these days. I designed a very good system for studying / analyzing hands and building sims for review. It's a mix of getting things done, reviewing alone and with a friend but also about outsourcing. There are multiple collaborations that I have going currently, and the way they work together is very powerful in my opinion. Without mentioning names and getting into details about the collaboration, it looks as follows:

a) Exchanging hand histories with 1 person - we review each others' HH from recent tournaments and make a printscreen of hands that we would've played differently and schedule a call to discuss those spots.

b) Comparing 2 databases with a player playing slightly higher stakes, but has a similar approach in terms of studying - a lot of solverwork - and finding leaks in our frequencies. Building a plan of what to work on in order to fix those leaks. We schedule a review session 1-2 times per week together - review hands that we played in this particular spot and discuss ideas.

c) Multiway 3-way spots - working closely with couple friends on multiway spots. Running 3-way sims, scheduling review sessions and solving complex gametrees on the server together. We are currently trying to study turns and rivers more often, as it feels like we have a decent understanding of flops mechanics already. I was doing a bunch of work on my own for 3-way, but I feel that working in a group is a bit better, because population deviates so much that in order to get good answers and build strategies, we have to brainstorm what playerpool is doing differently and how to adjust to it. 

d) Outsourcing - PKO spots to solve - I have a friend that I collab with and he solves PKO spots that I tagged for me.

e) Outsourcing - FT spots to solve - similar to PKO spots, he solves FT spots in HRC beta / GTO+ postflop ICM adjusted. Sometimes goes through the entire FT and tags hands to discuss with me on a later day. 

f) Deep work on my leaks which I do alone - working hard on my vs bet game currently, as I am not sure if I am playing vs turn and rivers bets correctly. So far, if I compare my calldowns to equilibrium I am mostly doing a good job, however some people say that it's still too much calling, as playerpool plays differently. I went deep in a rabbit hole in terms of how the population is playing on aggressive nodes last night and discovered quite a bit, that I can't share publicly unfortunately. What I can say though is that it's always important to question your assumptions, look at data, nodelock sims to see if and how you should be deviating. Our brains are tricky and our memory is rather selective one. Also, it's always important to verify everything, even if a lot of people say the same thing. Just to make sure you know.

g) Having a lot of fun drilling spots vs GTO. I use both GTOW and DTO, it really depends on how 'complex' the game I want to play is. Training vs solution is something that can discourage you from playing if you are not great theoretically, and something that can give you a massive confidence boost if you know what you are doing. I was playing very simple spots that show up often, like BVB, BB vs IP and IP vs BB and SB 3bet. The more you play the more addicted you are, so be careful. 

h) Preparing sessions for 1 on 1 coachings and for seminars. This can also count as a study routine, more like re-capping of what I already worked on in the past to be able to present this knowledge for a student or a group on zoom call. This game is so complex that you always discover something new!

g) Beer and review sessions - those are spontaneous evening/night sessions as I usually review my tagged hands alone, but sometimes we go through them in a group setting. I think it's very powerful to get opinions of others as I can be biased and also can misinterpret solver outputs on occasion.  

• ​seminars 

We are continuing with this project of course and I don't think we will stop at any point in the near future. We did some small improvements and changes lately in terms of handling admin and in terms of website/discord design.  The biggest change and cool news that I can share is that we hired a new coach - Empirical700, and he will be focusing on PKO content. He already did multiple sessions as a guest coach and community feedback was great, so we decided to let him do his sessions alone, as they are pure gold. I've been working with him for some time now and I really like his approach to poker and studying.  Welcome Sven!

• Pokercode community coach

I did a bunch of sessions as a guest coach with Simon and Curtis in the past as a community member. On top of that I did 2 trial sessions on my own in May and feedback was amazing. Because of good feedback and new content and value I can provide to the Pokercode team, I officially joined them in June as community coach. I'm very proud of that achievement, especially because I didn't apply for a position but was selected by representatives. More on that here: www.pokercode.com/blog/meet-mammoththegr8-pokercodes-newest-coach I will be doing 2 sessions per month for now and the main focus will be PKO and 3-way strategy in tournaments.

• Pokercode Grindhouse 3

I also got accepted for Grindhouse 3. I will be in the house in September and stay there for 10 days. Super excited of course! Fabi also got a seat, so LFG #teammammoth! If you are unfamiliar with Grindhouse project from Pokercode you can watch previous seasons on youtube. 
www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-eP6yArJKCa9FQXw9LabZUdG2HpNiTJO
​www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-eP6yArJKCar7M9QCtN4X-_zR2gC-YKM
​Grindhouse 3 will probably be on youtube mid / late September 2022.
I will be in Vienna on 8 September, so if you would like to grab lunch or beer let me know.

Peace, 
​Mammoth
​

​

Hello! I wasn't posting for a while, so let me fix that with a big announcement.

We are running pre-scoop promotion for seminars:

If you would like to have more information or have any questions regarding seminars and our promotion, please drop me DM on Discord. 

• Seminars

Let's start this update with couple words about seminars that I'm head coach of. We've been working as a team since January and after 3 months of working together I can say that I'm very happy about how things are going. I had so many doubts if this is going to work and I can say after a while, that I wasn't expecting this project to work as well as it is working currently. This is mostly because of awesome people I do this with, so big, big shout out to Fabi, Ole and Wenzel! 

Feedback that we got from community was very positive so far as well which makes me super happy. I have massive trust in this project and we will continue doing this for quite some time for sure. Good job team!

• Twitch 

Recently, I decided to do free coaching sessions on Twitch with Deckflow, Praaap and Eddie. I'm enjoying the experience so far and will do that most weeks. You can tune in on Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Times may vary, so keep an eye on #events in my Discord server. I always post when we go live. 

• Study

As always, a lot of that. I'm using a leak finder spreadsheet currently to identify my leaks, and realised that I have so many. They are frequency leaks. My frequencies were off compared to optimal in spots that I wasn't even aware I am leaking. Big one was that I wasn't floating enough on turns (bet vs missed turn c-bet) but also I do miss some probe bets from BB. Some frequency leaks are clearly wrong frequencies vs optimal, but I'm fine with those based on my current understanding of pool tendencies as well as exploits that I try to implement after nodelocking many spots. 

• Things happening in the world currently 

Very sad times in Ukraine. I got very emotionally involved, especially at the beginning of the war and also got involved in volunteering. ​I hope this ends soon, I hope it never started and I hope it ends well for Ukraine. This situation definitely had an impact on my mood, motivation and things around that. 

• Mindset & motivation

Because of what I just mentioned, as well as recent downswing, playing some cashgames to try new format as well as focusing a lot on coaching, my motivation for playing was very low, hence low volume and poor results. I'm playing way better game when I'm playing often and stick to my routines, which I wasn't doing first 3 months of a year.

• Pokercode

Two or so months ago I had a privilege to be a co-host of Simon Ronow session for Pokercode about preflop exploits. Simon (IgorKarkarof) liked how I work and liked my math/solver based approach which resulted in me being invited to co-host a session and that was very very cool experience. I really enjoyed time spent on zoom calls and preparing material / discussing spots. For all of you that are in Pokercode, you can re-watch it on the platform. Let me know what you think! Also, stay tuned, as we are already preparing second session. This time, we will discuss postflop exploits (one of my favourite topics). The session will be on 6th April 2022.  

• Results and volume

Not much to say here. Low volume, poor results and the biggest downswing of my career, but I'm feeling positive as we are recovering slowly. Also, I'm pretty hesitant to call it a 'downswing' because of small samplesize of games and also mixing some 200s and 300s in December/January + not cashing highest buy-ins. This resulted in being down around 20k, which was about 250 buy-ins (mid December - mid March)
​

• ​Plan for next quarter of the year

​With SCOOP coming up, I will definitely focus on playing more and studying harder prior to the championships. Wenzel had a great idea of doing a 'prep week' when we study hard for 7 days or so do be in the best shape and be ready for long grind for couple of weeks. We will see if we do it or not, but it's pretty cool concept overall. 

Best of luck to all of you!

Let's start with quick summary of December 2021. 

The biggest loosing month in terms of money lost in my career, but if we look (as we should) at buy-ins lost, it's not that bad. Also, one of the lowest volume months by far. This is because of taking days off for Christmas and taking it easy in December as well as playing 8-10 tables for the most part. I definitely understand that loosing/winning more and more dollars is just the way it is when you are moving up. I'm happy with the progress I made and that my winrate didn't drop as I moved up again. Felt pretty confident in most situations. Realised how important it is to get a good table draw on high stakes, as in $200+ you can get pretty stacked table often times, and those guys put you into less comfortable spots. This is great, I really enjoyed playing pots with players that I consider to be one of the best mid/high stakes players out there, when I was grinding evenings in December. It was for sure very solid lesson and I gained ton of experience and proved to myself that I can battle and hang on. Many people feel like they are pushed around by stronger players, and it wasn't what I felt. This is most likely the nature of my play style, that is rather aggressive and rather call-happy at times. Most times actually. 

average buy-in: $101
money lost: $8.7k
buy-ins lost: 86

Summary of 2021

This was very busy year for sure. A lot of work done off tables. A lot of coaching sessions done, group sessions, seminars, 1on1s. A bunch of 80 hour+ work weeks in the books as well. Great feedback received, exciting projects started and great people met. I'm super grateful. 

Locking myself in the room and dating all the solvers for couple hours per day made me dream of EV and solver charts sometimes. It made me stronger fundamentally. I would totally recommend spending time like this to anyone. Try this out for a month, quarter of a year. The rate of improvement is just insane. Definitely the best decision I made during pandemic that I can think of. 

Working pretty hard and spending tons of hours on poker made me realise one, very important thing. This game is so complex and everyone sucks at it. Hence our future is pretty safe I would say. People say that increase in access to solvers and other tools will kill the game. It won't. Not even close. Why? Because you need to put in time and effort to study it, and most people are too lazy for that. 

It also made me realise how hard I need to work in the 2022, because I know nothing about the game. There is so many spots in which my confidence level is strong 1.4 out of 10. Poker is too complex to master it. I also understand and admire even more then before players that put in time. Players that show up everyday and make less and less mistakes on tables, because of sick work ethics off tables. This is just crazy to me how hard some players work. Massive kudos to that small group of high stakes players. I hope that someday, somehow, I would be able to do that as well.

Highlights of 2021:

- biggest highlight is by far starting my own seminars. Feedback was incredible and it makes me work even harder to deliver better content. I learn along with all the guys that trusted me and are showing up on sessions. I'm super happy receiving all the positive messages and success stories. DMs about how much it helped and how much stronger a player became because of my sessions. I just want to say big, big, big thank you for all the kind words, but at the end of the day, you did it yourself guys! 

'But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it.'
Morpheus, The Matrix

- another highlight is definitely finally meeting the guys that I was working with and got help from for so long. Meeting 2 of the German machines in Vienna and going together to Pokercode Festival in Bratislava. 

- pokercode festival in Bratislava. Was super cool to meet most of the guys and see real faces behind screennames as well as pokercode coaches and staff. I know that you have plans to repeat it and please do so, as it was super fun.

- increasing my average buy-in from $30 in January to $100 in December. 

- maintaining reasonable winrate bb/100 of 8-9bb on higher stakes.

- getting involved in staking and helping players that I trust and believe in. You guys are on the path to something great, and you shouldn't be stopping just because of small bumps on the road to success. 

- on the personal level, I feel like I had very good connection with my parents this year and I'm really happy about it. It's been a harsh ride with poker and their understanding of the fact that this is what I want to be doing. It felt like they are happy about my choice now and they are big supporters. We had some emotional moments with that topic over Christmas. 

- getting more self aware and grateful about many things. I don't know if it has to do with me getting more interested in topics like ufos (uaps) and cautiousness. Maybe, maybe not. Most likely it does. How long till the full disclosure??? Doesn't seem like it's gonna happen.

- valueing my time and prioritising tasks better. Biggest improvement started at the end of the year, but quickly became numero uno on the list for 2022. 

I think that's most of it. I'm sure I forget plenty, but I value my time more now and don't want to spend an hour writing this post :)

Goals for 2022? 

- be happy
- make others happy
- pay attention to health and well-being
- keep working hard
- keep providing value to other players
- increase average buy in 

No monetary goals, no no-coffee days, no cold showers, no 1000 push-ups per day. That's it. 

Peace yall and happy new year!

Novermber 2021 was very good results-wise. I am slowly moving up stakes, and my average buyin is constantly increasing. I play the highest stakes possible in the morning during the week and on Sunday I play up to $300 currently. Last Sunday I had good runs in $250 Fifty Stack on GGpoker, finished 4th and also final tabled €250 High Roller on PS.es and finished 3rd. It hurts not to win at least one of them, but it is what it is. 

We started working a bunch with HRC beta and scripting and with population data. Idea is to create very good preflop strategies vs playerpool and use PF frequencies for GTO+ sims as well. It will take a while, but it's definitely worth spending tons of time on. 

Unfortunately they cancelled EPT Prague due to covid restrictions. I guess the global lockdown number 3 is just around the corner. 

I like how Standard Backing is changing slowly. There is more activity in group sessions and more and more people attend sessions. This made me come back to providing 2 group sessions per week for them. They also hired mindset coach. I haven't watched the content yet, so nothing I can say about it.  I also enjoy interactive community sessions in Pokercode. They let us unmute now during reviews, which is way more efficient than typing into chats. Love the idea and interaction with coaches. 

For group seminars that I do, this month is very likely be the last one, as I promised this to be 12 weeks long program. However, I enjoy doing it and will definitely continue in 2022, but with slightly different format. There is even more value to come, so stay tuned!

I gotta say, I'm pretty excited for next 2 months, there is a lot of cool stuff going on right now and I think you will enjoy changes for seminars as well. 

​Best of luck everyone!

By the I didn't play much this month. I got sick in the middle of the month as well as I took couple days off playing to prepare content for seminars. Overall, I am very happy with where we are heading, despite poor results. My average buy-in is increasing and my ev bb/100 is also going up, which is definitely great news considering (one would've thought, tougher fields). 

I am super pumped with discoveries I made about the player pool and topics I already covered as well as what I have in store for next month. Playerpool DB analysis + PF nodelocks + postflop sims is very powerful combination.

We are back on track with running sims on server. Additionally, I got more familiar with Simple Preflop and nodelocking takes way less time now. 

On top of that, feedback about seminars was great so far. This always helps to create even better content and stay motivated to provide value. 

That's all I have to say about October. Pretty boring month. I will increase my volume in November, as the winter is coming and all mammoths stay in their caves. 

By the way, I am trying to qualify to EPT Prague. If someone is also going, DM me please. 

​GL everyone!