Hi,

I’ve recently signed up following some advice from Alex ‘Assissinato’ Fitzgerald.  I’ve been emailing him on and off and brought a couple of his courses and they’ve helped me massively; improving my game endlessly.

Some history – I’ve been playing poker for years (10+), but never had any decent results.  I fell out of love of the game as a result and took the best part of 2 years off.  A couple of months ago i was working in Bristol and decided to join the local casino for a weekly tournament they were running.  I finished 2nd and felt good!  So decided to start playing again.  This time i was going to take it seriously.  I spent a month studying and watching videos before emailing Alex for some pointers, i brought his ‘Master Tournament Poker in one class’ series and realised that my ‘Tight is Right’ style of play just didn’t cut it any more.  I also realised that i wasn’t respecting position enough and my PreFlop game was weak, leading me to constant difficult decisions OOP (believe it or not, I had never seen a PF Opening hand ranges chart!).

I spent another month reading articles, listening to audiobooks and watching videos.  Basically saturating myself with poker theory in the hope that i would learn by osmosis.  Mid-May I rejoined PokerStars and lost.  Although i was semi-regularly getting quite deep, variance being the bitch that it is was hurting me and i only had a couple of min-cashes.  I then read an article suggesting that to reduce my variance i should look at reducing the player pool, which makes perfect sense, now I’ve seen it!

So i signed up to a couple of different sites and have started getting results! So far, i’m 3/3 cashes, only one being min-cash.  I’m hitting the bubble with bigger stacks and am feeling more comfortable in the early/mid stages.  My bust outs tend to be situations where i can identify where I’ve played wrong/incorrectly/sub-optimally or I’ve lost a flip (AQ vs 88 being yesterdays).

I realise that’s a VERY small sample size and that i’m going to be unable to keep this up, but it’s making me feel good about my play and my poker.  There’s room for improvement, of course there is.  LOTS of room for LOTS of improvement, but i have an open and positive attitude towards it now. I’m willing to learn, i’m willing to accept help and i’m willing to try new things.  Hopefully with decent(ish) results?? 

I plan to have at least 2 study sessions a week and ‘self-assess’ every morning, if I’ve played a tournament the previous evening, posting hands/situations on here that i’m struggling with (i’m uploading what to do facing a donk bet after this).  I’m planning on keeping this momentum and attitude up.  Positive results are only ever going to help me!? So, hopefully, they keep up!?

Onward and upward!

Hello and it’s good to meet you all, i look forward to hearing your advice in the future!

Thanks for reading,

Jon