Hi Dogs,
Thanks very much for your post. I do remember playing with you on the way up, and I have a couple of notes on you. I remember you were more aggressive than most which makes you harder to play against.
Thoughts and feelings on the journey in general? Back in 2015 I meet many players and made friends and we Skyed a lot. Did you make a conscious decision to not chat much and make friends on the site? At what point was 1B the goal?
As I mentioned I used to play online professionally (cash) way back in the day. I had grand aspirations of being the next Tom Dwan, who was absolutely my hero. I can say with confidence that I’ve never had as much passion for any other endeavour as I used to have for poker. It was my whole life.
However, I was held back by poor work ethic and poor emotional control in various ways. It was a crushing disappointment to me to finally admit that my dreams weren’t going to come to fruition. I’ve found great happiness in business ownership but my failure to “make it” in poker really bothered me quite deeply for some time.
After finding Replay and messing around a bit I really found that all that poker knowledge was still in my brain (I’ve played more than 4 million hands lifetime). I wanted to set myself a challenge to finally put my disappointment to rest. Even though it’s just play money, nonetheless the discipline to grind it out day after day, and suffer the bad beats and try and maintain emotional composure is very much real.
The challenge brought me right back to my younger self and I could immediately relate to how I used to feel back then. It was marvellous to finally, as a much older man, train myself to conquer those emotional weaknesses and even improve my game a little too, whilst grinding the hours day in and day out. I feel that I can finally put those past disappointments behind me.
I didn’t chat much because I usually played 6 tables, 4 at a minimum right up until the very end when I was playing just one or two of the very highest limit tables with all the big boys. 1B became the goal when I realised that to do so, I’d have to tangle with the best players on the site. I knew I wanted to test my ability to accumulate chips, but also to play and compete with the established leaders, which I have done quite well, and honestly I’d like to do more.
Its a pretty simple strategy to win a LOT on RP.
Yes, admittedly the player base on Replay isn’t super challenging which is to be expected from a play money site. Even at the very highest levels I rarely got put in spots where I didn’t have a good idea how to proceed. However, on rare occasions I did run into some amazingly good plays from some players, mostly at the elite stakes tables. I wish that Replay made it easier to search your past hands, because I can remember my hole cards and other details but didn’t save the hand history so I have no idea how to dig them up.
For players who want to grind it out and accumulate chips, rising up the stakes to the very top is certainly achievable - just takes a lot of time, effort and consistency.
You played a fairly basic, winning strategy.
This is true, particularly preflop, though postflop I do like to get creative. If I had to state for newer players what the biggest mistake I noted was, it’s playing too many hands, and putting too much money in the pot with garbage. Makes it very easy to win money from those players.
