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Cashgame challenge 4NL to 800NL: twitch.tv/davitsche


DaVitsche

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HeyGuys,

Some of you already know and are regulars in my stream, others have no clue what's going on. If that is the case, let me fill you in:

I am David Vanderheyden, the Unibet Open Commentator, and recently I've been part of the new Unibet Poker Ambassadors. 

Recently I started doing a 4NL to 800NL stream, we started with €100 on 4NL and are trying to grind our way to 32k to give 800NL a shot. Most of it while streaming!

My schedule (CET) looks something like:

monday: 15h00 - end
Tuesday: 15h00 - end
Wednesday: No Stream (sometimes special stream)
Thurdays: 15h00 - end
Friday: 15h00 - end
Saturday: 15h00 - end
Sunday: No Stream (sometimes special stream)

That being said, the is no real hard start/stop to my streaming pattern. Mostly because my life is pretty uncoördinated. So if I wake up too late, it might be a little bit later, if I woke up too soon, a little bit earlier!
The best ways to stay informed would be following the channel: twitch.tv/davitsche and turning on notifications, or following me on twitter: twitter.com/davitsche

I won't always stream poker, I like gaming in general, so sometimes I might just play Smite, PU Battleground (love the beta!) or something random.

We've been going at it for some time now, and I'm glad to say the bankroll is already up to ... €107,94. Oops. Somehow we can't get past 10NL. We already tried twice, and this is the second time we move down, and the third time we're going to attempt getting 25 BI's at 4NL FeelsBadMan.

Hopefully you guys can give me some pointers on how to please our Lord and Savior, RNGesus.

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Hi DaVitsche,

It's always great to watch your streams and you helped/ help lots of us with advices, strategies, how to react in different spots and even provide to us useful poker materials(like the push sheet, poker books we should read, youtube channels we should follow* Doug Polk's was an example...), all to make us better players and improve our chances to make some money by playing poker on Unibet :)

Good luck with the cash game challenge, it might take some time but for sure you can do it 👍 :cash: 

 

 

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You cannot have a positive life and a negative mind...
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Suscribed.

What bankroll management are you using?

What problems did you found on NL10, it was just variance? I ask because Im in a similar position, I have tried 2 times in NL10 riseing to a 500 bank, but then hintind downswings of 10 to 20 BI, so Im back in NL4.

 

EDIT. You just answer my questiong in the streaming! Thank you!

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  • 1 month later...

@MathrimC demanded I updated my stream thread, so here I am with some minor and major news.

Challenge wise this has been a lot more frustrating than I could have ever imagined. It's a nice example of what "variance" in poker looks like. If your opponent has 20% to win a hand, he will win 20% of the time, regardless of whether that happened before or not. RNGezus (the Lord of the Randon Number Generator) has no memory, so he doesn't care :D

We're still playing 10NL with a bankrill of around €420.

It took 3? shots to move up from 4NL to 10NL, but after the dust settled it's safe to say our risk or ruin on 10NL is limited so we can whip out some numbers about 4NL. Not everyone knows that you can request a spreadsheet from Unibet Support with some cool information about your adventures at the cashgame tables. The file in question has lots of info, but we'll focus on the vitals "Played Hands & Profit/Loss". It also has interesting stuff like Date, Stake, Rake, Flops Seen, Buy-In amount, Cash-out Amount".

This brings us to the 4NL part of this challenge. We needed to turn our €100 into €200 before moving up to 10NL. The first time we succeeded after 14 days playing. We played 29.870 hands on 4NL and got €89.72 profit. We converted every ticket we received into a bonus, so this also shows how valuable the challenge points can be for low stakes players as we got around €10 worth from converting tickets to bonusses. Unfortunatly we had to move down to 4NL again after 8 days of play as we got destroyed during our first attempt. Having a aggressive Bankroll Managment forces you to follow this closely since otherwise the likelyhood of running out of bankroll becomes too great.

2nd time on 4NL went a lot better than the first time, with €95,26 profit after just 4 playing days (9.281 hands). Hooray!

However, disaster struck 11 days later as we dropped our buffer of 10 buy-ins on 10NL again. Luckily I've been around long enough to apply logic and remain rational about these situations and we moved down once again.

3rd time we were forced to play the lowest stake were turbulent, mostly because of a Unibet Open and Unibet UK Tour preventing consistent grinding, but eventually we won €92.29 after 16 days playing (23.415 hands)

This gives us a nice view on the total numbers. In total we played 57.496 hands on 4NL for a total profit of €282,79, not taking into account bonusses we got from converting tickets and cash rewards from the challenges. In order to put things in perspective we're going to convert these numbers to "bb/100".

"bb/100" is the way most pokerplayers talk about their winrates, because time is relative, since the length of your sessions & amount of tables you play have an enourmous impact. To do this we divide the profit by the big blind in order to get the total amount of bib blinds won.

282,79/0,04 = 7069,75 bb's won.

Now we take the amount of big blinds, and divide it by the total amount of hands. This would be the amount of bb we won per hand we played. But because these numbers are too small, this is simplified by multiplying to by 100 to get the "bb/100" notation that pokerplayer hold so dear.

(7069,75/57.496)*100 = 12,2961

So on 4NL we had a winrate of 12.29 bb/100 over 57.496 hands. To put this in perspective, having a winrate of 3-5bb/100 is already considered good depending on the stakes (the higher, the lower your winrate will be due to better opponents)

One of the reasons why I wanted to talk about these numbers was to show you guys how relative a lot of pokertalk is without full info. "I won €300 playing 34 days of poker" doesn't seem too fantastic, but when you break it down to the amount of hands played, you get a more complete view. And beating a stake at 12bb/100 is pretty damn awesome.

I don't have the full data of 10NL since we're still playing that stake, but once I moved up to 25NL and secure a solid bankroll, I'll update you guys on those numbers.

Lastly something some news from the twitchstreets. 

Thanks to the amazing @Ametrine aka amarylle the whole channel got pimped with an overlay, and the emotes she designed for me are awaiting approval. On top of that, 2 days ago, while watching the PUBG invitational, I noticed a weird pop-up about tax info ... That's right boys, we got our sub button! #SUBHYPE

It's safe to say that it's been a big week for me on twitch, and I've got you guys to thank for it. We're currently growing super fast, we're closing in on the 1.000 followers aka a 10h Banzai Stream (RIP sanity) and after 2 days with a subbutton we already unlocked 4 emotes!

So if you feel like haning out, and/or discussing some poker hands, feel free to drop by at twitch.tv/davitsche

tldr;

We beat 4NL at 12.29bb/100 & subbutton + almost 1k followers on twitch

Much <3

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@ArtyMcFly wrote:

Nice work on that 4NL winrate. I'm kind of surprised at how much your bankroll apparently fluctuated at 10NL given you're a crusher. This game has so much crazy #variance.


People don't fully understand variance, they think back at those 2 graphs they've seen from Full Ring nits where it's a nice and steady line going up and they expect every winning pokerplayer to have a graph like that.

That being said, streaming forces me to play much longer sessions, so a lot more sessions where I'm playing below sub-par and that obviously has a huge impact as well. But if it wouldn't be fun, I wouldn't do it :)

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@ArtyMcFly wrote:

Nice work on that 4NL winrate. I'm kind of surprised at how much your bankroll apparently fluctuated at 10NL given you're a crusher. This game has so much crazy #variance.


Streaming is a also a factor to consider. It's a huge disadvantage. You're giving away your playstyle for free. And you cannot play anonymous.

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@MicroGrinder wrote:

Streaming is a also a factor to consider. It's a huge disadvantage. You're giving away your playstyle for free. And you cannot play anonymous.


Maybe, but some streamers say they play much better on stream, because they are more focused as they don't want to make mistakes 'in public'. In addition, I think sponsored players/ambassadors sometimes benefit from other players spewing against them. On Stars, for instance, several team pros (at least those that play micros) seem to benefit from what they call 'red spade equity' as people make nonsensical bluffs against them. FWIW, when Sam Squid was streaming for Unibet, I made a spewy bluff of my own against him, just so I could tick off "bluff a pro" on my bucket list. He snapped me off with a really bad hand and I lost 25 quid. :(

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@ArtyMcFly wrote:


@MicroGrinder wrote:

Streaming is a also a factor to consider. It's a huge disadvantage. You're giving away your playstyle for free. And you cannot play anonymous.


Maybe, but some streamers say they play much better on stream, because they are more focused as they don't want to make mistakes 'in public'. In addition, I think sponsored players/ambassadors sometimes benefit from other players spewing against them. On Stars, for instance, several team pros (at least those that play micros) seem to benefit from what they call 'red spade equity' as people make nonsensical bluffs against them. FWIW, when Sam Squid was streaming for Unibet, I made a spewy bluff of my own against him, just so I could tick off "bluff a pro" on my bucket list. He snapped me off with a really bad hand and I lost 25 quid. :(


For sure people are out to 'get them' for the fun. But everyone encounters the randow spews and yolo's. But let's say you stream 200NL and 3 regs on your table know how you play and know your thought process in pretty much every spot. That's  pretty - EV.

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@MicroGrinder wrote:

For sure people are out to 'get them' for the fun. But everyone encounters the randow spews and yolo's. But let's say you stream 200NL and 3 regs on your table know how you play and know your thought process in pretty much every spot. That's  pretty - EV.


Just play GTO. Problem solved. :)

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Yeah, I'm putting in a lot of work off the tables to get ready for that part of the challenge. At this rate however, it's unlikely I'll ever need it :)

But there is a solid point being made as a streamer that you lose equity. It's true I'm focussing better on my decisions, but the same is true for my opponents, noone want to make a huge mistake if they're a known viewer. Heck, I even had some 400NL players hunting me down for fun on 4NL so they could watch me react to the change in agression.

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@DaVitsche wrote:

But there is a solid point being made as a streamer that you lose equity. It's true I'm focussing better on my decisions, but the same is true for my opponents, noone want to make a huge mistake if they're a known viewer. Heck, I even had some 400NL players hunting me down for fun on 4NL so they could watch me react to the change in agression.


Biggest downside to streaming has to be people knowing your ranges. It's extremely valuable information to know stuff like your 3bet ranges, especially at micro stakes.

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@DreamFyre wrote:


@DaVitsche wrote:

But there is a solid point being made as a streamer that you lose equity. It's true I'm focussing better on my decisions, but the same is true for my opponents, noone want to make a huge mistake if they're a known viewer. Heck, I even had some 400NL players hunting me down for fun on 4NL so they could watch me react to the change in agression.


Biggest downside to streaming has to be people knowing your ranges. It's extremely valuable information to know stuff like your 3bet ranges, especially at micro stakes.


Well – at micro stakes most 3bet ranges are either hardly anything but value hands or standard like value + 54s/A2s. If DaVitsche thinks that people use this information against him, he should try playing a flexible range where he sometimes 3-bets 54s/A2s as a bluff, and other times he uses JTs/A5s as bluffs. That’s a good advice for all players, the only downside is that you can easily start overbluffing at this point because you forget to call/fold some of these hands some amount of the time.

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  • 1 month later...
  • 5 months later...
  • 1 year later...

Well, this is going to be awkward.

Simply put: We failed. We couldn't get past 25NL, we did twice, but 50NL put us back down real fast, and 25NL isn't a level where you rebuild, you just want to shoot through it and spend as little time there as possible.

After 2 years of trying, albeit not always our very best, it's fair to say we call this challenge a failure. This has made me realize a lot of things about streaming cashgames, and about being a beginning player in today's game.

The Game

- The regs got a lot better: Obviously streaming played a big role in this, we explain our way of thinking, which allows decent opponents to perfectly adjust to the way we perceive the population without knowing this is happening.

- Kinda weird for me to say, but I think nowadays the rake is a lot harder to beat on smallstakes. Smallstakes are probably the stakes that are affected the most, so you can't afford to ever not play your A-game, since your winrate is going to be very low to begin with. This is even more true for players that are just at the start of their poker "careers", since they still have a lot of fundamental flaws.

The Stream

- Cashgames are not as sexy as MTT's: People like to watch you have deep runs, and eventually take down a tournament, preferably a big field one. Cashgames is more about the combination of all those 5bb pots that you pick up along the way, and people don't randomly play 200bb pots. So as a viewing experience, it's definitaly a niche within a niche.

- We have a pretty cool community on twitch. I can't stress enough how chill you guys are. Very welcoming to newer members, supportive, well behaved (for the most part), and most of you improved so much over these two years that I really hope you guys keep making the game fun, and rewarding for yourselves.

So yeah, kinda emotional because of the failure, but I think it's better to just let it go, and stream cashgames while just clicking buttons and talk to you guys, the same thing we've been doing for 2 years.

Much love,

David

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