Upping my game

This post is going to be a bit of a beast. I was planning on making it as my end of the year post but I feel like now is a better time. I had been thinking about continuing to grind to the end of the month but I've played enough to know I'm not happy with my game right now, changes have to be made. I've got a bunch of time to take a look at things while I'm away from the tables at the moment due to being ill. It was either do this or order Christmas presents... *yawn* ;)

Next year I want to dedicate a lot of effort to online poker, progressing myself and making as much money as possible in the current state of the games. Despite what people are saying there's still a LOT of money to be made out there and now is a really good time life-wise for me to do that.

Goal
I'm planning on having one main poker goal for next year and that will be to make $150k (£100k).

To achieve that I'm going to either have to double my volume at 1/2 and 2/4 by playing more tables/hours, or move up in stakes. I don't really want to become a 12+ tabling grinder as I think I'd be bored, growth stunted and burned out within the first few months. I've got respect for people who can do that, but unfortunately I'm not one of them. So the route for me will be to progress in stakes up to 3/6 and 5/10 to achieve roughly $15k months. To be able to do that I think I need to make big changes to the way I learn and approach the game.

Where my game is at
Just now I'm at the stage where I can beat $1/2 for 3-4ptbb and $2/4 for around 1-2ptbb. So the next step is to grind a ton of $2/4 and $3/6 and improve my winrate to the 3-4ptbb kind of bracket. That's what I've been doing this month, but I don't feel like I'm crushing the games as much as I do when I play $1/2. I can feel that my edge is weaker due to there being less bad players. I feel like I'm improving but not as fast as I'd like, I want to be making bigger steps forward.

Since the start of the month I've been making notes on specific areas that I don't feel confident in and need to improve. They all relate to not having enough of a fundamental grasp in certain areas of the game. My learning up until now has mainly been from training videos, hand reviews, things like that. While they've taught me the correct tools to crush the smaller stakes games it's made my play somewhat formulaic.

Education
The 2/4 and above the games always contain a few good regulars who have learned from the same material I have. Top high stakes players I chat with all seem to have the same thought that you need to be crushing the regulars when you play a limit, not the fish. You should be crushing the fish anyway. I feel like I need to 'tune up' and take my game up a level to feel confident exploiting the regulars, the training site memberships isn't enough.

So I have a list of specific areas to work on, some I have the required resources to get started on, some I do not. I'm looking to invest roughly $3k in education over the next couple of months, but I'm not yet sure what the best route is. At the moment I'm thinking CTS/SlowHabits new $1,850 book, plus some one-on-one coaching with a high stakes player. This stuff is in addition to the regular head reviews, forum posting and training video watching, not instead of it.

If anyone had any ideas on good things to study at this stage, or players to work with gimmi a shout. I've already contacted players I know regarding coaching. Cheers!

If u got this far u deserve pics of the new Miss World, from Russia... Kseniya Sukhinova