I will start off with telling you a bit about myself. I'm Ryan from Ontario, Canada. I have been playing poker for about 5 years now, playing small home games and some online. Recently I thought of what I want to do with my life and I have decided that I want to try to eventually play poker for a living. I currently have a great, stable job and have limited time for poker so this is going to be a huge feat to make the transistion.

I took a small break from poker last fall to think of how I'm going to go about making this transistion. In this time I really took the time to look at my game and well found out I was a fish and I was going to get nowhere with the way I was doing things. The first thing I decided to was to cut down on the live games and primarily focus on online play to fast track my learning curve. I also created, with the help of others, a list of things I needed to learn to become successful. This list is for MTT's as 90% of my play is tournament play.

This is the list we created…

Topics
1. Poker Terms
2. EV
3. Hand Ranges
4. Pokerstove
5. Using a HUD
6. Bet sizing
7. Fold equity
8. Game/hand analysis
9. Creating effective notes
10.Effective Stacks
11.Short stack game
12.Nash
13.Mid stack game
14.Restealing (3bet shoving)
15.Deep stack game
16.Preflop opening ranges
17.Preflop 3betting ranges(value or bluff)
18.Preflop Flatting ranges
19.Position
20.Cbetting/flop textures
21.Short handed play
22.Blind defense
23.Stealing Blinds
24.ICM
25.Bubble Play
26.Final Table
27.HU Play
28.Dealing with tilt
29.Being Patient
30.Dealing with Variance
31.Bankroll Management
32.Volume

I have been spending alot of time working on the these aspects and already after 4 months of studying I'm noticing a huge difference in my thought process. I ran into a little bump in the road late last year, finding info on these topics was difficult! I bounced around different sites, forums reading everything I could, but with sites having conflicting views on MTT's and forums giving partial info it was damaging my game! So I decided I better join a training site and now here I am at TPE, a site that only deals with what I'm looking for and members that are on the same page.

With all that being said, I'm glad to be here and stoked knowing that I have a ton of video's and reading material to go through.

P.S. – Bigdogpckt5s is such a boss! congrats on the stellar week! and WTG Danny for winning the Canada Cup