Cabbie Wisdom Introduction

Hi guys. This is my new blog. It will be mainly about me playing poker, different challenges, ‘aha’ moments and everything that helped me reach the point I am in today.
For those of you who don’t know me, let me start with a short introduction. My name is Mike.  I have been playing poker for the last two years (I got into it just after the Black Friday) after I finished college. I’m now 25 years old.
As well as I’m a poker player, I’m also an entrepreneur, husband and apparently, a blogger. And if you are wondering what the deal with the blog name is, I can say that the reason is pretty simple. During my student years I did work as a taxi driver to earn some extra cash (it was before I found poker).  And even though it lasted for as little as 3 months, my friends thought it was funny to stick with calling me a Cabbie’ for the last 4 years now.  Hence the name. And I don’t know about the “wisdom” part of the blog name, but I’ll try to share what I know and what helped me to climb up the limits in poker and actually make a living out of it all.

The purpose of this blog

Ok, now let’s get to the more serious stuff. Why am I creating a blog? As I said, I have been playing poker for two years. At first I struggled a lot.  And I do mean, a lot. During my first 200.000 hands above 0.02/0.05 cash games I was losing badly.

Badly enough, every advice I ever got was in a ballpark of “it depends”. If you are on any poker forum, you probably get that a lot, too. I am not saying I didn’t get any good advice there. I’m not even saying that “it depends” was a bad answer for me to get. But everything immediately changed towards the good when I realized one thing. When I hear it depends it should mean that I will be better off if I’d figure it out myself.

And I really was. By learning to ask myself the right questions I started analyzing my plays much better and started moving up pretty quickly from that point on.

And it’s all the reason why I’m writing this blog in the middle of the night. It’s a way of giving back to the community, to help players that struggle with their game but strive to get better. To make it more interesting, I will post my own poker challenges but I will also include various strategy articles I find useful, videos, hand analysis and everything that can bring you more value at the tables.

Challenges for 2014

Many of you think that more tables means you are a better player and thus you earn more. I did too. But for 2014 my goal will be to play only up to 10 tables instead of trying to get used to playing 20 and more. I didn’t not understand that at least for now me adding tables does more damage to my game than it adds profits. You must find that sweet spot that you still make the best decisions but adding one more table will hurt you more than help.

In total, I would like to play between 500.000 and 700.000 hands and become a regular at NL100.

Obviously, I have fitness, diet, business and family goals as well, but let’s not get into that now. I will break down these goals in my further posts.

Cabbie Wisdom for the Day

I know that the name sounds silly but I thought that creating a segment specifically for posting strategy advice, would guarantee I don’t miss it. Sometimes, the advice will be about poker in general, your mindset however I’ll try to record some of my sessions and analyze them tricky spots.

I firmly believe that the way I learned helped me shape a special point of view on the game that gives me a chance to explain poker topics much better. And did I mention that I studied psychology and pedagogics? And you can always contact me with questions if you have any, I’ll try to answer them individually but I may also make a video about topics that are useful for everybody.
That’s probably all for today. But in my next post I will collect a few graphs about my progress so far, some posts and answers I got in the forums, maybe my trickiest few hands from recent sessions.