Back to PLO PRO - 10k a month?

Hey there!

I am a former PLO heads-up specialist. I used to play professionally from 2008 to 2019, mainly heads-up online at PokerStars between PLO50-PLO500 at normal tables and later zoom. I also took my shots at stakes from 1k-5k, and live I have played heads-up with 100-200€ blinds. None of these shots ever did me any good; I usually ended up emptying my Stars account or wallet and then having angry sex with the dumbbells at the hotel gym, followed by a remorseful weep on the shower floor. By the time of 2019, I was very fed up with poker: it seemed that the poker economy was getting worse, PokerStars gave its best love to winning regulars, and there didn't seem to be any future for Poker, so I decided to lay it down. I went to med school to study Psychology with a splash of statistics (these were somewhat familiar subjects because I was always more of a nerd than a gambler).

Now, 5 years later, I am making my master's thesis, and I find myself being an empty-pocketed student who is able to work from home with a flexible schedule, so I decided to give poker a second go! I decided that if I can start small and make 2-3k a month at first and then climb up to mid stakes and average 5-10k, then it is worth it, and I can give my everything to the game I hate & love.

What am I going to change this time:

• No more egoistic heads-up: I used to battle for the "mid stakes Crown": the right to sit alone at the PLO 500 HU zoom table. Normally I played the days against the regs because it was way more fun than hunting at Ongame. If I finally got to keep the table, I was way too exhausted to play against recreational players and ended up just closing the table. It was more about making a childish statement to myself than making money. Also, heads-up is a dying breed, so I'll transition to 6-max and also learn Hold'em to expand my opportunities, including playing live games abroad.
  
  
• Hire a boss: Between my studies, I have around 20 hours to give to poker per week. I will make my schedule beforehand and stick to it. I have outsourced my schedule to a person I live with (she knows better than I what is good for me), and I don't hold the master key to my Password Bank, so there is not much I can do if I get the urge to grind during lab days. I also have an arrangement to meet people for lunch at the same time every day, and weekends are mostly scheduled for something else. So I view this as a part-time job with strict working hours.
  
  
• Eat, sleep, lift, repeat: I had the tendency to win 1-3 buy-ins per day and then punt 30 buy-ins in a 9-hour tilt session. Luckily, I used to write a poker diary every day when I played, and I now finally had the time to read them through. The first thing that caught my eye was how a missed lunch and a badly slept night altered my view of poker, and during those days I felt the cold grip of variance as a personal attack. So, to prevent this from happening, I now have to fulfill certain nutrient and circadian rhythm requirements before I even get the key to the office. Then I also have to wake up at a certain time, go for a morning walk, and be back home at a reasonable hour, or my second boss will literally **** on the floor. And to make sure I do my sports, I have scheduled sports five times a week with my friends, and after so many poker years, they really don't care if I try to reschedule with the argument: "THERE IS THIS F*CKING FISH DONKEY CALLING STATION I CAN'T LEAVE THE OFFICE!!!1"
  
  
• Self-fulfilling prophecy: Sometimes you have days or opponents you don't believe you can win (or even sites, when superstition kicks in). This does not mean I have to punch my head through these days. Instead, I can let it go. Play someone else, play some other time, or play somewhere else. And afterward, I can try to think why and where these thoughts emerged from. No need to be too hard on oneself.
  

What will we have here in this blog:

• I'll track my progress (and motivate myself) with some small side bets / bankroll challenges. You are free to give estimations of what a player could win, and I will make prop bets on GG Poker accordingly. I won't make these bets very big since I don't want people to come and play with me to alter the odds, but something to keep me and the readers interested.
  
  
• I bought a streamer setup, high-tech microphone, etc., and I plan to make a couple of videos once I beat my social media anxiety.
  
  
• I love to analyze poker. Back in my day, I never used GTO tools but instead solved stuff on my own with Juice & ProPokerTools. And even though my solving was not as exact as in GTO software, I managed to figure out some concepts before my opponents. In around 2015, I used PPT to go through all my ranges and calculated that I had sufficient proportions of every necessary two-card combination in my range, and I brought them there with terms I had made myself: pure equity, nuts proportion, and flopability. There are similar conecepts in modern poker theory, so I was kinda on to something. I was also the first one to realize that you need to limp in 50bb HUP PLO, which might not sound like much, but I was very proud of it. Too bad 30-50bb HUP wasn't very robust against changing rake environments.
  
  
• I study Psychology, and my passion is in sports psychology, which has a lot of confluence with the mental game of Poker. So if people are interested, I could write or share some interesting articles on the subjects. I also do some statistical analyses with R and Python (also SPSS if necessary) and could write something about that as well. Now I am trying to make my own solver for different stud variations.
  

I was more active in other poker forums, but since my country does not allow those forums anymore, I decided to move my writings to TwoPlusTwo