Story: Review of a poker journey

[Caladrias]

The time has come. My own Unibet community blog. After reading several end of year reviews in the past week, I started thinking it might be time to make a review myself. It won’t only cover the past year though. I’ll try to reconstruct my own poker journey in this thread, starting from how I got into poker up until the point where I arrived now. (WARNING: this will be a long read.)

But maybe I should introduce myself first. Some of you reading this will know me as a SNG/MTT grinder on Unibet. In real life though, Caladrias is a 23 year old Belgian engineering student, who plays poker on his MacBook Air laptop whenever he’s got the time. I have finished my bachelor’s degree in Engineering Electromechanics, and I’m now studying for my master’s degree in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. I live in Ghent, one of the biggest student cities of Belgium. In one year and a half, I’ll be jumping into the real world to find my first real job. But that’s more than enough background about me, off to the interesting – that’s what I hope at least – part of this blog now.

 

Twitch stream lurker

“Tue Mar 15 2016 17:22:03”. That is the response Nightbot gives me when I ask him when I created my twitch account.  And that’s also the point in time where I think I should start my story. Up until that day, I had been watching twitch streams of a few CS:GO championships already without having an actual twitch account myself. After a while I wanted to get involved in the chat box, so I created an account, and from then on I started watching more and more different types of streams. One day, the stream of a guy named Jaime Staples was featured on the home page of Twitch. He was playing No Limit Texas Hold’em Poker, a card game I had played maybe 10 times in my life with some friends back then. I did not even know you could play poker online. (Thinking back about it writing this, it’s really unbelievable that only 1 year and 9 months ago I didn’t even have a clue online poker existed.) I always really enjoyed these poker evenings with friends though, so I checked out this stream of this Staples guy. And what can I say, a whole new world opened itself for me. Pokerstaples was explaining his thought processes behind everything he was doing in this card game. Being a guy who loves both strategy games and mathematics, I naturally also loved to see all these cards being flipped over, see the changing percentages, hear everything about pot odds, check-raising strategies and much more. Instead of watching TV every evening, I started watching poker streams. In the first few months, I mainly watched Jaime Staples and his buddy Kevin Martin, two poker streamers who lived in the same house in Canada at that time. On Jaime’s channel, I eventually heard about the channel of TonkaaaaP, another friend of him who recently started streaming his poker games at the higher stakes. I immediately thought this Tonka guy (aka Parker Talbot) was hilarious, and up until today he is still my favourite streamer to watch. He explained his thoughts and strategies even better than Staples, and he was playing for so much money – occasionally winning an average full year’s salary or even more in a single tournament – which off course is exciting to watch. He only was a few years older than me, and he had already made millions of dollars playing online poker ! Waw. What a life. And then this thought came into my head, the thought with which it starts for most of us poker players I think : Hey, I can do this too, right ?

 

First deposits

Time to play some online poker myself. It’s the end of June 2016 when I logged in to my unibet account, which I already had from doing some sports betting when I was 18/19 years old. I deposited €50, installed the poker client and started playing. Cash games, sit and go’s, tournaments. I played whatever I saw, ran up my €50 to about €200 in no time at all, and off course lost it all back even faster. Sad times. But it was just bad luck, right ? I managed to get to €200 so easily, so I could do it again for sure. So I deposited another €50, and lost it again. Well, that was enough for me. I thought I’d just stick with watching Tonka’s twitch stream instead of playing poker myself. So over the summer, that’s what I did. I learned more and more about poker during these months, and at the end of September 2016 I decided to give poker another shot. I deposited another €100, and took a more cautious approach by playing at lower buyins. That’s at least what I think I tried to do, because I didn’t have a clue about what bankroll management was. So I probably wouldn’t say it was any sort of cautious at all, if I would be able to look back at it.

 

Upswing – Downswing – Major upswing

Anyway, late September 2016, so only 15 months ago, is where I like to think my poker journey really started. In the few months that followed, I must have applied the best strategy that exists in poker: The GGC-strat, as Parker Talbot likes to call it. Long form: The Get Good Cards strategy. I must have run hot, and managed to build up a €500 bankroll in about 3 months. At the last week of December 2016, I binked a few tournaments and suddenly had a roll of about €1200. I started playing even higher buyins, and yes you guessed it : two weeks later, Jan 18 2017, I was back down to €513,62. I was so sad about it and hated myself for playing those higher buyins. I know the exact date, because on January 18 I decided to become more disciplined about playing poker. I made an excel sheet to track my poker winnings and losses for every tournament and sit and go I played. I thought that this way of tracking myself would prevent me from playing too high, and would eventually also get me to know in which games I won and in which games I lost.

At that time, the exam period of the first semester at University had just finished, so I had a few weeks off. During those weeks I played poker all day long, mostly €10 SNG/MTTs and €25 SNG/MTTs once I got back over a 1k bankroll. Between January 18 and February 11,  I played 509 games (ROI : 16,7%) and got my bankroll up to €1480. Tracking my results really seemed to improve my discipline.

And then, a true miracle happened. On February 11 and February 12, I won the 2k gtd daily deepstack (The old version of the current 3k gtd Deep Impact). TWO DAYS IN A ROW. For €622 and €648 respectively! My bankroll skyrocketed to €2700, and I never looked back since. I must have been incredibly lucky to bink these two tournaments, because now I think I really played terrible poker back then. I had only been playing for a little over 4 months. An insane hot run.  

  

The hot run continues…

In the time that followed, I kept playing €10/€25 SNG/MTTs. By looking at my data I quickly realized that I was mostly losing money in these €25 MTTs, and mostly winning money in the sit and go’s. So I earned about half of my bankroll by binking two of these MTTs, but as it shrinked again to €2200 at the end of February I decided to stop playing these games and focus mainly on the sit and go’s. It went well. Really well. By the 14th of March, my bankroll was up to €3000 for the first time and I started throwing in the the €50 SNGs whenever they ran. Nice little bonus : my hot run did not stop. I was playing poker of a decent-ish level by that time, but now I do understand that I was also just running hot. By the 4th of April, bankroll was up to €4000. In the Easter break from University at the end of April, I started mixing in €100SNGs whenever they ran and continued to run hot. By the 4th of May, I got to the €5000 bankroll milestone. So that is the story of how I quickly became a regular at the highest SNG games Unibet has to offer…

 

Discovering the Twitch and Unibet communities

Around that time, I discovered Ian Simpson’s stream on Twitch. He streamed a few afternoon SNG sessions every week, so I often jumped in at those times too to battle him. That’s how I got to know there was a whole (Twitch) community around Unibet poker. Although, I didn’t really interact in chat a lot myself.

As I’m only a student I’m not rich at all, so I withdrew a big chunk of the money and continued to play poker with the other part of the money. Hot run can’t continue forever though, so I experienced some downswings as well as some upswings in the months that followed. In September, I also started watching the stream of @MathrimC (Really like your stream man, I still watch every time I can). Some day, I was seated at the same poker table as him, and chat started to talk about this guy at MathrimC’s table named ‘Caladrias’. I was honestly surprised that people knew me, and very honoured that they also seemed to think about me as a pretty solid player, (Thank you guys!). MathrimC confirmed this and talked about some SNG regulars ranking made by @monkeyheaven on the Unibet community forum, in which I was apparently ranked pretty high. I searched for it, read the blog and was surprised to see my name in between those of MUL, IanSimpson, N-B-A, kroll… All really good SNG regs in the games I frequented. From that day on, I really became confident in myself as a poker player. Again, I felt really honoured that several players thought I was a good player, while I had only been playing poker for just a year. So a well-meant thank you for all the props, guys and girls! ;) . Around that time, I also created my unibetcommunity account and got involved in both the Twitch community and the community here. So between September and now, I got to know a lot of the community people here.

 

The ups and downs of poker

It took me 5 more months after reaching the €5k milestone, but by the beginning of October 2017 (3 months ago) I finally reached a €6k bankroll. I also played the 100k challenges UO freeroll with three 2k UO packages, and reached the final table. Uhlen started to rail me on his stream, and I managed to get to the bubble. After 45 minutes of 4-handed play, I stone bubbled the package. 4th out of about 110 runners, with 3 packages up top. It was such a big disappointment, and in the next few weeks I also went on the biggest downswing I’ve experienced so far. Dropped back down to €4300, but I managed to climb back out of the hole eventually. Last week was even the second best week in my poker journey so far! I finished 4th in the Deep Impact for €317 on Christmas Day, 1st in the Gargle Blaster for €364 on December 26, And am up a few hundred in SNGs as well for a +1k week to end the year. I am very proud to say that from September 2016 to December 2017, I managed to run up €100 to almost €7000 in my first 15 months of online poker. 

So here we are now. At the end of my first blog post ever. Sorry for the very long post, but I hope it interested at least some of you how I got into the Unibet Poker streets. Thank you for taking the time and managing to read through all of it!

I also wanted to state some goals for the upcoming year, but I think I already talked enough for now. I have exams at University anyway in January, so you won’t see me too much at the tables for a few weeks. I’ll probably post my goals here after that period. I don’t know yet if (and how often) I will update this blog, but I thought it could at least be interesting to tell you guys how I got to where I am now. If you have any questions for me, feel free to fire them in this thread!

 

Then there is only one thing left to say to you guys: I wish you all a lot of luck in 2018, both in life and at the poker tables.

Happy Holidays to all of you!

Caladrias

[MctheBesT]

Great story mate.

Keep up the good work and happy new year!

Wish you the best of luck

[freddies]

Good read! Good luck in your journey. :)

[MathrimC]

Impressive results so far! Would never have guessed you were only playing for a little over a year 😃

[Psycho79]

Hey @Caladrias, great piece of writing, pleasure to read! 😃 I hope soon we'll read some more secrets of your grind 😛 You're quite new to the game, but many players should be jealous about the development pace and the discipline which separates great players from "casual gamblers" 🆒 I wish I had it all when first tried poker. Hope you'll leave some place for us here in 2018, in the meantime GL

[ArtyMcFly]

I love reading 'origin stories', so I loved your intro. That's a pretty amazing rise from zero to hero you've had. It all happened so fast! Congrats on your successes so far, good luck in your exams, and I hope to read about you continuing to crush the games in 2018.
*Subbed*

[JRE]

Very interesting and rewarding reading. I wish you the best of luck.

[fornicator99]

Good stuff! Will follow.

[Caladrias]

Hey guys,

I haven't been playing too much in 2018 so far. In the first month of the new year, I went all-in on studying courses such as Manufacturing Planning and Control, Supply Chain Engineering, and Simulation of Production and Service Systems. Quite the change when coming from the check-raising and the continuation betting topics we all love here. :) Passed 4 out of 5 exams, so I cannot complain. 

Poker is always on my mind though, so in February I started reading my first ever poker strategy book: Sit 'n Go Strategy by Collin Moshman. A very good read, I can recommend it to everyone who loves to play a sit and go or two. I already knew a lot about the majority of the topics covered in the book, things I picked up along the way by watching twitch poker streams and youtube strategy videos. However, I certainly picked up a few new concepts and some rules of thumb too that I implemented into my play.

Apart from this, I also worked on my headsup play. Studying/exercising headsup specifically was something I never really devoted time to, and doing this has really boosted my confidence in the headsup stage of the sit and go's. Before, all I really did was playing the push/fold-game. This often suffices in the turbo SNG format on Unibet, as the average stack size in the headsup stage is usually about 20BB or less. However, a non-negligible portion of the time you'll find yourself with deeper stacks headsup and you'll want to know what you're doing and why you're doing it. I feel like my game really improved in this aspect, and it should become apparent in my results too once the sample size gets bigger.

Speaking of sample size: I still didn't grind too much in February. A new semester at University also means a new start of the social life: a lot of parties and beers in the first few weeks. I did get to play some €10 and €25 SNGs, but nothing near to the volume I usually get. Results-wise: about breakeven.

March then: the past two weeks were all about the UOS on Unibet. I didn't have too many evenings where I could play from 7pm until midnight or so, so I only played 8 events, all in the first week. Cashed one low event, going out in a 120BB flip with QQ < AK for a chip-lead stack, and bubbled one high event. The other 6 events: brick-city. We all know the MTT variance can be cruel, right? 😏 

Good thing I still had some SNGs to play when I wasn't busy busting UOS events. I noticed the €10s seemed particularly soft, probably because most of the regs were playing the UOS in the past few weeks. So when I did have the time, I grinded them, and these are my results between the 26th of February and the 12th of March:

Games Played: 249
Profit: +€820,11
ROI = 32,94%

An extremely high ROI, probably caused by a combination of softer opponents and some rungood :happy: Here's the graph that goes with it:

In the upcoming months, I'll have a lot of work for University again as most courses include projects during the semester. Goal is to focus on that, and play some SNGs whenever I can. Probably mostly the €10s and €25s, as I don't like to play the highest ones too often if I can't get a decent global volume in (#variance). If the second semester exams in June go as well as the ones in January, I should have three long months of summer holidays. Ideal for grinding the highest stakes SNGs again! I'll update here whenever I feel like updating :) 

Good luck at the tables everyone, and thanks for reading! 

 

 

 

[monkeyheaven]

Nice sng results. €25+ games were definitely tougher in February.  Really surprised you’ve not studied sngs more, there’s so much edge to be had in 20bb poker HU, I tend to play push/fold from about 8bb vs the weaker opponents.  

[Caladrias]

The past 3 weeks at the tables since my last update, have been excellent. I feel great about my game at the moment. I think I made a lot of progress in the past few months, and I'm playing better poker than I ever did so far. It's nice to see that the work seems to be paying off:

These results, together with the results I had at the beginning of the month, make March the best month I've had so far since I'm tracking my results. Played mostly €10 games in the first half of the month, and mostly €25 games in the second half. I played at least one game on 29 out of 31 days, and ended up having 27 winning days and just 2 losing days! A feat that would almost be impossible to achieve by playing MTTs because of the huge variance, but is very well possible in sit and go's. I hope the big upswing will continue for another while :atisfied:

Last but not least, I'd like to give a big shoutout to 74ofhearts. He's a regular in the €25 SNG pool, and started streaming his sessions on Unibet in February. He's a really nice guy, and he is very good at explaining his thought processes behind the decisions he's making while playing his games. You can find his stream here: https://www.twitch.tv/74ofhearts. Give him a follow and get notified when he goes live :Smile:

[Pucuri88]

Hey @Caladrias!

Nice results, congrats!

What time in CEST you play mostly? And how much sng you can play in a month? I just wondering how much 10€ and 25€ games are running.

GLGL mate!

[Caladrias]

@Pucuri88, I usually play between 2pm and 6pm CET, or from about 8pm to 12pm CET. 

The amount of sit and go's you can play, depends a lot on how many tables you play simultaneously. I can tell you however that the €10 games usually start running quite conistently around noon, until 1-2am every night. The €25 games don't run too often in the afternoons, but start running a lot around 5-6pm until about 1am CET too. The €50s and €100s hardly ever run. 

So I'd say if you play 4 tables at a time, you can play about 10 sngs per hour. Just multiply with the amount of hours you like to play and you should have a rough guess of how many sngs you can fire up monthly. I think playing 1k games per month should be very achievable for regs that mainly play sit and go's. :) 

[Caladrias]

As the SNGs were very reg-heavy this afternoon, I felt more like playing an MTT evening. Only cashed 1 out of 10 MTTs I decided to play, but what a cash it was:

 Just tipping my biggest MTT score so far, the evening couldn't have ended better :atisfied: 

 

 

[Ole800]

Hey man, congratz on the score.

I just found this blog after you got retweeted by Unibet. I recognised your nick as we've played quite a bit of Sngs against each other.
I haven't played as much recently, and when I have played I haven't seen you. Maybe you've started changing aliases more often :)
Hope we'll get to play some against each other soon. Good luck!

[Psycho79]

@Caladrias congrats on pushing your limits ahead!  I stopped by for a sec at Lappin's stream yesterday, and it was a pleasure to see you terrorizing the table 🆒 Definitely the experience from SNGs was the chain on your opponents' legs. GL!

P.S. Go back to your SNGs now, we don't want you here! 😛

[Shoryureppa]

@Caladrias Inspiring to say the least. 

Very honest how you mentioned the downswings along with the upswings. Sometimes the insights into downswings are very much neglected and sometimes give other up and coming players a false hope so to speak. 

I also don’t have the money required to start a bankroll here so I’m trying to build one from bounties and tickets. Maybe one day I’ll have a blog of my own to share. 

Once again very inspiring and keeping doing your thing man. Also very cool with the GGC Strat. Love it. 🆒

[Caladrias]

@Ole800 Fun to hear you found this blog via Twitter! I've played quite a bit of €25+ sit and go's in the past few weeks, so if you did too you have probably played against me. But indeed, I have started changing aliasses more often. Can't give the other regulars too many reads you know 🆒

@Psycho79 Thank you man, it's a pleasure to hear that from you! You're definitely right, once I managed to get into the chip lead on the final table I really tried to steamroll my opponents. My experience with ICM from the sit and go's was really helpful. I do have to say that there were quite a few spots where I was unsure what to do before reaching the FT though, my MTT game can certainly still use a lot of improvement. So don't worry, I'm sure you will stack me from time to time when I meet you at the tables 😉. 

@Shoryureppa That's very true, it's easy to talk about your poker experiences when you're running hot and winning everything but it's a lot harder to do so when nothing seems to be going your way. Hearing a lot of positive stories and barely any negative ones, can indeed be very misleading. But it's important to always remember that even the best players in the world also have a lot of losing days. That's just how it goes in poker. Being able to manage your money well, is the key if you want to grow as a player and move up in the stakes. Good luck with building your own bankroll, with good discipline it is possible for sure! Thank you for the kind words too, I love you're loving it :happy:

[Caladrias]

So this happened:

Watching this message pop up was easily the best thing I've experienced so far since I'm playing poker :popeye: Managed to bink it in the first final I played! It will be my first live event, really can't wait for it and I'm thrilled to maybe meet some of you community members out there too! :laugh: 

 

[SCOBY]

Congratz  !!!!!

[Sect7G]

Congrats on the Live MTT score.  Those are always a blast.

Question for you... what player gives you the toughest time in SNG's.  I always find that whatever game format I focus on there's always that one guy that just soul reads me.

[Caladrias]

Good question, but difficult to answer. As I often change alias, and a lot of other regs too, it's hard to see if one particular player manages to put you in though spots time and time again. 

However, two weeks ago on Sunday evening I played a bunch of €50SNGs together with MUL. He was on the FT of the Odyssey, Supernova and Ice Giant Bounty all on the same night, and started mixing in some SNGs at the end of his session. He is probably the toughest guy to play against, who doesn't change his alias all time. Luckily he doesn't play the sit and go's all too often, and when he plays it's only the €50/€100 games 😏

[Caladrias]

Yesterday the much-anticipated UOS2 kicked off. Sadly enough, my exams at University start next Monday so I'm not sure if I'll be able to play all the events. The plan for now is to rise and shine early, study all day and blow off steam at the poker tables in the evenings. We'll see how long I manage to do this before I start falling asleep behind my screen. 

Anyways, I played all 6 events on the starting day. Registered the first three events from the start, and before the first break I already busted the Low and Nano ones. Twenty minutes later I also busted E1. Really great start, leaderboard aspirations were up in the sky. 😏

As I was well prepared, I thought the late events started at 21:00CET instead of 20:30, so I registered some sit and go's while waiting for them to start. I'm such a donkey from time to time. Oh well, late-regged E4/5/6 twenty minutes in and I managed to run up some stacks in all three of them. The Bounty High went very well, got into the chip-lead with about 100 folks left and maintained it until the bubble play commenced. Long story short: cashed all 3 events, and got to headsup in the High event with a 4 to 1 chip deficit. I chipped up nicely though and had my opponent on the ropes, but lost a flip 55 < AQ for the win. Blinds got really high, and after a few more all-ins back and forth I finished in second place after 30 minutes of heads-up play, for €407 (Incl. €93 Bounties). I guess that should cover my buyins for the main event, if I keep bricking these qualifiers 👍 Fantastic result to start the series, but being just one coin toss away from unlocking that winner's avatar and not getting it still did sting a little bit :laugh: 

The score propelled me to the 5th place in both the High and Overall leaderboards. Hopefully I can follow it up with some more results in the upcoming events, I'm curious to see where I can get. Some places lower seems more probable than some places higher :happyshy:

Also a big thank you to @Psycho79 for the FT rail, it was a lot of fun, much appreciated! 

[Psycho79]

Hey @Caladrias! Congrats again on your excellent score 👍 It was a pleasure to watch you in action 🆒 Also playing against you is always a lot of fun. I confirm you were the best at the FT, it was really really close 😏 You're turning into a MTT beast. I'm sure you'll make another good runs on the series and find your way to the victory next time 👍 Best Regards!