My poker journey: the road so far

I started playing poker about six months ago, and at first, I thought it would be easy.

Stage one: mount stupid

I’m not new to the game itself. Thanks to the Wizard of Odds, I know the optimal strategy at poker-based casino games like Ultimate Texas Hold’em, Pai Gow Poker, Four Card Poker, and various flavors of video poker. So I thought I’d do really well at poker tables.

I didn’t. I got wiped out a few times at cash games, and struggled to even make it to the final table at small poker tournaments. The only times I won, it was due to sheer luck. I was, in technical terms, on Mount Stupid.

Stage two: hubris

After a string of losses, I had a genius idea: find which pairs of hole cards are typically not played but often wins. Let’s called that a poor man’s Moneyball.

So what I did was make my own poker simulator (thankfully I’m a pretty good coder so I can do this kind of stuff myself) and run millions of simulations, dump that in cloud storage, and run some analysis. What I found out after hours of coding and data analysis was that aces and kings win a lot.

Stage three: YouTube

I was still not doing well. I was winning a little more often but whenever the hand went beyond preflop I usually either got rinsed or gave up and bled out. So I turned to the usual teacher we all rely on, YouTube.

I found average videos at first. A lot of buzzwords (“board texture”, “c-bet”, “pot-committed”) and some general good ideas, like trying to go heads up rather than join big multi-way pots. But not great.

Then I discovered a few good ones that knew what they were talking about. BlackRain79, SplitSuit, Gripsed, and a few others. This took my game to a new level; I saw some charts, learned really good strategies, etc. I wasn’t great yet; I won on a more regular basis, but I was still not feeling as confident at the poker table than I was at the blackjack table (I’m a card counter).

Stage four: GTO and Jonathan Little

On YouTube, the poker training videos that spoke to me the most were those from Jonathan Little. I learned a lot about GTO, about fundamentals like playing in position, calculating pot odds, etc. Those were things I had heard about in other videos but they felt too difficult or advanced; with the tutorials from Jonathan Little I finally understood.

I saw a big improvement in my game. I was now able to see when other players made mistakes (after the fact). I knew all the concepts, the buzzwords. So I subscribed to pokercoaching.com and took my game to the next level with quizzes and classes. I studied GTO charts. All the good stuff.

This was the point where I realized it would be possible to actually make a living playing poker. I wasn’t really committed but I saw it would be possible.

This is also the point where I started questioning GTO. No doubt that it works great heads up, but the reality I experienced in the poker room was that people always called and getting heads up was not that easy.

Stage five: Assassinato

Through pokercoaching.com, I discovered Alex Fitzgerald, known as Assassinato. I ended up buying his audio books (on Audible) and his training videos (on Gumroad). Worth every penny.

Just as much as Jonathan Little is GTO-driven, Alex Fitzgerald is data-driven. He scours databases to see how things unfold in real life, and through his coaching business he spots patterns in how people play.

At that point it was pretty clear to me that it was as good as it would get in terms of coaching/learning unless I was ready to hire a private coach, which I wasn’t. If anyone out there wants to take their poker game to a level where you can regularly beat other players at your local casino, that’s the recipe: a pokercoaching.com subscription and whatever materials you can afford from Jonathan Little and Alex Fitzgerald. There are other good coaches on pokercoaching.com, there’s even Gripsed on there which I really like. Quizzes are worth it and there’s tons of great videos.

Stage six: Pokerstars

At that point I was confident in my game so I figured I’d play online. As Jonathan Little put it, the secret to success in poker is to learn the fundamentals, find a game you can beat, and play that game a lot.

So I tried Pokerstars, and I hated it. I did okay, but many small things bothered me; for instance they have table games, so I sometimes figured I’d play a bit of blackjack or UTH while waiting for a poker tournament to start, but then I realized that pokerstars takes a fee on top of the house edge on those games, so I stopped playing those. And then at least twice I found myself disconnected and reconnected (some kind of issue either in the app or their infra) at the worst possible time and was unable to call a big bet, costing me substantial amounts of money.

So I gave up on online poker. At least for now.

Stage seven: a hunch

Based on my journey so far, I have a hunch. Something that could disrupt GTO. But I’m not ready to share that yet, so stay tuned!