Hello again, it's been a while since my last update. This one is triggered by a player that I was deep with in big $55 last night who told me that he likes my blog and wished me comming second in that tournament. If you are reading this, GG mate, I took it down as you busted, unfortunately. 

Last month or so for me was a very smooth transition from SNG to MTT. I am currently playing low and midstakes games, and I am very happy with results and progress. Confidence level is very high right now. Of course good results help to build that confidence, but I am certain that amount of work done off tables is paying off as well as amount of coachings that I gave in the last 2-3 months have impact on it too. 

I have been fortunate enough to run deep in couple tournaments lately which motivate me to work harder and develop further. There is a ton of spots that I am not confident in and those spots need a lot of work and a lot of solves. Luckily I am part of a team of dedicated and hard working players that I can always ask for advice and brainstorm hands. We are currently working on population research and solves with inputs from H2N range research. It seems pointless to run GTO vs GTO sims as population on low and mid stakes deviates too much from optimal. I am really happy how things developed over last couple months with a team, and I wish everyone the best of luck. I am certain everyone will hit that sunrun soon.

Coaching is going extremely well too. I am getting a lot of good feedback from players and also I was recently asked to start webinars for Standard Backing team, which I work for on top of the SNG webinars which I am currently a co-host of. 

I also have a bunch of projects in my mind for the future about individual coaching as well as CFP programme. I really enjoy working with others and coaching. There will be an update on this relatively soon. Unfortunately, a day has only 24 hours and with long MTT sessions, coachings, GTO work with a team, reviewing my games and games of students, database reasearch, all days kind of blend together and there is not much time to do much else. There is no balance in my life right now, it's all about poker and development, but I strongly believe this is the right approach. People saying you need balance are not as successful as those who say that balance isn't that important if you want to reach the top. I learnt a lof from Patrick Leonard's podcasts, blogs, discord. I really like his approach and I think he is a goat when it comes to poker. 

Now, couple of recent results and EV line. The MTT grind started ~ 15 June 2020. As you can see I am running very well. EV bb/100 is only 8bb/100 which is something that I am not happy with. I developed a plan how to work on my game in the next 4 weeks and hopefully this winrate will increase. I also got rid of discount for coaching and increased coaching rates, as I would like to focus on my game a lot in the next 2-3 months and increased rates will decrease number of potential students. Unfortunately it needs to be done, my development and working on my game was always a priority, so I am sorry for that, but you gotta do what you gotta do. 

I wish you guys all the best, and I am sorry for not updating too much. I hope I can get better at blogging in the future. (I think I said it at least twice in the past)

Peace!

A little update for you guys. I am slacking a little bit and taking it slow during summer. I haven't been playing too much volume, but instead putting a lot efford and hours in coaching, studying, watching vids, making notes, running SIMs. Definiately my overall game is getting better and my understanding about ranges correlaction, equities and frequencies is stronger then ever. I started to really enjoy working with theory and solvers and I hope that it will pay off in the near future. This month I will still be focusing on strategy and reviewing hands. From September onwards, I will start putting more hours into grinding and all.

This is results since last post:

Hello again guys. It's been a while since my last post, but I was pretty busy lately and had no motivation to post anything. I have an idea of posting few hands/week and giving my thoughts about general strategy and to look at hands from both theory and exploitative approach. I have been working a lot recently with GTO+ and run a bunch of database simulations over different stacksizes vs BB. Additionally, I have been working with nodelocking feature within the software, as on under $30 MTTSNGs population deviates A LOT from what optimal frequencies and strategies are.

Since my last post I haven't been grinding as much as during previous months, but I have put a lot of work with GTO+, focused on preflop strategies and ranges. I hope that it will pay off soon.

My main game was MTTSNGs as usual, but I mixed in some MTTs as well. I also started to play on multiple sites, adding pokerstars.es and partypoker to my daily grind schedule.

2018 was a decent year. I was very low mentally in the beginning as I had to move out from Malta, because the place was too expensive for me. Decided to rent a cheaper place here and it was worth it. I am really happy that I started blogging, created my own website at http://www.wanderer-pro.com and developed nice community for MTSNGs in my discord channel. Results could be way better but I can’t complain overall. I have big plans for 2019. Will post my goals for this year in the next post.
Regreds for 2018. Volume is the 1st thing that comes to mind. I should be playing more. I also regred not working out this year. I was slacking a lot. 2019 will be much much better, I have many goals and feel that this will be a turn around year!

I really need to work harder on maintaining routines and following schedule. For the last couple of weeks I did not perform very well in that regard. I became a little lazy and unorganized. Going out with friends on fridays and saturdays completly messes up my sleeping schedule. I really feel like I need to schedule my days to optimize time usage. This is something that I'm going to implement next year. I would like to put the days apart and have routines and time blocks for studying my game, reviewing with others, relaxing time and grinding hours. I do think that if I follow strict time schedule, I would perform way better. So many people say that poker is about freedom. We can play when we want, study when we want etc. But it doesn't mean that we can completly ignore basic principles and become hugely unorganized. At the end of the day, this is work and we should behave as professionals.

Poker this month is going OKish. After good start in the begining, I have had some breakeven or slightly loosing days. This is mostly caused by myself though. Not grinding enough and not reviewing daily as I used to.

Overall, I feel like I have improved my play on the blinds. I was focused a lot on BB defending and SB play in blind v blind spots recently. Feeling more confident everyday. I wonder if having possitive winrate on the SB is possible at these stakes. Anyone has it in green after good samplesize?

I'm taking the rest of December a little slower as usual. Christmas time always has been relaxing time, time for family and friends. Still gonna grind a little, but no pressure. Happy holidays everyone! :)

Hello again guys. I forgot to summarise my November, so there it is. I was a little lazy compared to previous months, but happy with it anyways. I have been discussing hands more and more on discord, meeting like-minded grinders this month. The group is growing and we also filter and kick inactive players, as we feel that sharing and not getting any value back is wrong. Hopefully in a couple of months we gonna get a strong, hard-working environment built by people that want to improve. I recently started thinking about my complete transition to mtts, as the bankroll is growing. I think I will play daytime mtts on different sites as a start and still adding some $3.50+R at the end of the session. Still waiting for the bankroll to hit that $10,000 so I can play $20 ABI (very conservative).

I also had very good start in December on sngs. Really happy to be back on track after pretty bad November. Gonna start adding $7.00 on demands and $11.00 KOs to my sessions.

More updates soon 🙂

$3.50+R are my main game this month, I focus on them mostly and been working hard on improving postflop play. I try to think deeply through a hand, focus on ranges (my range and villains range), apply sizings that I think are correct in any given spot and target specific parts of opponents range. Some people say that sngs are push/fold game only. I strongly disagree. Most people have this approach and they don't work on their postflop game. They don't have a gameplan and don't understand their range at all. I think that if we minimise mistakes postflop, then we can build stacks and chip up nicely. If we constantly build up, we will be on a shortstack less often then our opponents, so we will have less very marginal EV spots. AI EV in <15bb is around 5bb/100 or so, so pretty marginal and regs don't really make mistakes on this stackdepth, so we should work hard on postflop gameplan to accumulate as much as we can. This is where EV comes from in those games IMO.

I also started adding some mtts to my daily grind. Yesterday I FT bubbled Big $7.50 :( Onto the next one!

October is going well so far. I managed to build my my bankroll so I can grind $3.50+R regularly now, which makes me very happy as I think I have a huge edge in this format. What I noticed however is that on demand sngs are not going as well as expected. I am running terrible and probably playing pretty bad in $15 and in $7 I don't think I can make double digit ROI. I decided to stop grinding $15s for now and focus more on $3.50+R and add some vanilla mtts to my sessions. This way I will lower variance and have a shot of building my bankroll more quickly. I do believe small stakes mtts are super soft these days and I can achieve 50%+ ROI in them.

I feel very motivated. I realized that I need to put in the hours and hard work to succeed. I am hoping that July will be the month with the highest volume ever and that I keep grinding more after seeing results. My goal is to play at least 40 hours per week. It is absulute minimum. So far so good. Hard work pays off for sure.