I'm kceow2981 and I was thinking it might be fun to create a thread documenting my micro stakes cash games journey, as I try to grind my way up in stakes hopefully. I was thinking I might post my current graph that I have up to this point, and then occasionally add in some of the sessions that I have from day to day. Maybe I'll occasionally throw in some hands that I run into and we can discuss what other people might do in the same situations. Currently I play 1 or 2 5nl tables on ignition, as well as the occasional CC Freeroll or other freeroll tournies on ACR when I want to play a little bit of poker but take it less seriously. By the way, I tend take a pretty conservative bankroll management strategy where I try to profit 50 buyins at each stake, so don't expect anything crazy from me :P I might wait to win a few more buyins than most would, just so I can be absolutely sure that I've gotten good enough to warrent moving up.
Here is my overall graph including the 5k hands I've played so far on Ignition at 5nl, my winning session graph that I had today (89 hands), and my overall bankroll I have in excel. You'll see a bunch of stuff in the bankroll image. At the top is the original amount of money I put on each site (ACR and Ignition), beneath that you will see poker expenses like Poker Tracker 4, Flopzilla, and things like the amount I've lost playing poker in person (I've never been to a casino so these losses are in silly home games). After that is additional funds that I've gotten from rake-back or freeroll winnings. This money is already included in the "In Game Total"'s that I have for each site below. And then at the bottom of the sheet you will see the amount of money that I have on ACR right now and my current profit on ACR (negative... I got beat up at 2nl there before going to Ignition). Then is the current money I have on Ignition and below that the profit that I've made on Ignition. Below that is the profit that I've made when combining both ACR and Ignition. Below that my total "invested money" which essentially is the total amount of money that I have taken out of my bank account and spent on poker stuff (the sum of all my initial site deposits and my expenses like PT4). And then FINALLY there's my overall profit which is my money that I have on ACR and Ignition minus all my expenses.
Will follow your progress, have a best of luck!
On a quick separate non-cash game note, I placed 3rd in a CC freeroll today which was the highest I've placed so far My previous best was 10th so that was fun got very very lucky in a few spots where I was very behind in an all in preflop and sucked out on a few people.
Haven't played in a while and I just played a nice 100 hand session where I ran very very hot. Felt good. Here is today's graph.
nice thread! i will follow your progress!
So How are you doing now with your grind ?
Hey sorry I took a bit of a break lately but started playing again yesterday. I'm thinking I'm only gonna post updates maybe every 1,000 to 5,000 hands or so and I play really slow so the updates won't come super frequently, but today was pretty good. I stacked 2 people. 1 I flopped 2 pair with KJs and a CS called me down to the river, and the other I had pocket 99 and hit a set on the flop. Board was T97 rainbow and I was up against an aggro fish. He donk betted into me and I raised on the flop. He calls and the turn is a 6 which I hate of course. He checks to me and I think about it for a little bit and eventually conclude that many hands that would call my flop raise have an 8 in their hand (T8,98,78, A8 etc). So I simply check behind and take my 20% chance to hit a full house+ on the river. Welp I hit quads on the river. The aggro fish bets into me which makes me super happy of course since I have the nuts. I raise a solid size thinking he likely is trying to get value from a straight. He then re-reraises me and I EZ go all in for the last bit of my stack. He calls and shows 48o. Fit perfectly into what I thought of the guy (aggro fish) and he in fact had the straight. Sure I hit the nuts on the river and got lucky but I'm happy I played the hand correctly on each street. Anyway here is todays graph.
Which site do you play on?
Do you create this graph by yourself or it is made automatically?
I play mostly on ignition though I do play the cardschat freerolls on ACR. And these graphs are made from the poker hand tracking software Poker Tracker 4. It costs anywhere from 60 to like 150 bucks or so depending on how advanced of a package you bought. I got the minimum one for like 60 bucks.
We've officially hit $120 bucks as our bankroll peak after about 9k hands total. Started at $35. Pretty cool. I'm happy I've been profitable so far. Need to get my hand total way up though. Close in on that 50k hands eventually.
do you play only NL Holdem?
Yeah so far I only play NLHE. I play 5nl 6max cash games, 1 or 2 tables at a time. I occasionally play the freeroll tournaments as well. I randomly played like maybe 100 hands of PLO once before but I have no idea what I'm doing there.
New thing I've been trying is playing 5nl Zone poker on Ignition. It's interesting for a few reasons. It's unlike Zoom poker on PokerStars because people can't track you from hand to hand. So it seems like it lends itself to be played in more of a GTO style rather than exploitative. Though that's not totally true if you know some very bad tendencies of the player field you are playing against. In that situation you can still exploit those tendencies but they need to be the tendencies of the whole group, which I think it is probably difficult to find out that information.
Another thing that makes this more difficult is the fact that you can't fold and stay at the table to see what the other people at the table do for the rest of the hand. When you fold, no matter what, you get brought to a new table and don't get to see how the action finishes. I feel like that makes it all the more difficult to find out what the overall player pool tends to do at these stakes.
I'm trying this mode out since it is so much faster than sitting at a regular cash game table, and I should be able to quickly find out if I'm a winning player at this mode or not and what my BB/100 is here and compare it to my regular cash game tables to see what is more worth it over time.
Also interesting to note is that the next highest stakes after 5nl is 25nl. There isn't a 10nl which I find peculiar. So I wouldn't be able to move up stakes until I hit $500 in my bankroll and I'm not even close to that currently.
Alrighty I've been gone for a while because of some life stuff including having problems purchasing a new computer. Now I'm back and excited to keep the micro stakes grind going. So far in the last 3 days I'm up about 5.5 buy-ins which is like $28 since I play 5nl. So we're off to a good start.
Easy come, easy go. Was up 5.5 buyins since coming back and now down 4.5 buyins :P Still plus about 1 buyin over 1k hands but still. Never a big fan of hitting it big and then throwing that hard. Most of those buyins lost were to 3 crazy hands where I accurately predicted I was way ahead during the hand, and then all 3 times the river gave my opponent a disguised better hand where I thought they'd put their money in the middle with their hand BEFORE the river anyway. They all just happened to improve by the river and screw me over :/ I'll post some of those hand histories in the future.