Interview with 307th  (part 2)

Charles Hawk: You are currently shot taking 1ks, and basically never settled at one stake for very long. If you are able to get into 1ks what would come next? Would it be time to focus on playing more fish, or maybe time to move on to the next challenge?

307th: I think it'll be a good time to focus on playing fish for a while at least. Moving up any further would require learning a different format, which makes it more work than moving up in hypers. I'll probably learn turbos and hu cash at some point though.

Charles Hawk: Do you think the top 5 of the 100-300 regs could beat the bottom 5 of 500-1000 regs (In EV over a large enough sample)?

307th: Yes, definitely. There is correlation with skill in moving up but there are other factors too, so the top players at 100s-300s will always be better than the worst players at 500s+ IMO. The gap between the best 100-300s players and the worst 500s+ isn't as big as it used to be though, a lot of the worst guys at 500s+ have dropped out.

Charles Hawk: What are your thoughts on husng traffic declining over the last year? What are your predictions or the state of the game in a year from now?

307th: I've barely played fish in the last year and a half so I don't really know, lol.

Making any prediction about the future is hard too. It will continue to get harder, but the game won't die out in the next year.

Charles Hawk: What are your goals in poker? How long do you plan to play it?

307th: My modest goal in poker is to make enough money that I can live off of it while I find a way to make a living doing something I enjoy. My ambitious goal is to make enough to live off of the interest of the poker winnings so I can do what I want.

I'll probably play it 1-3 more years. Don't know for sure though.

Charles Hawk: You are living with currr, torg0th and some others? It would be interesting to know what kind of dynamics you have in your poker house?

307th: I live with them sometimes, but I'm currently living on my own. As far as dynamics, generally the way it goes is currrr works really hard and makes a lot of money, I go in hoping to play a lot but end up spending half the time I'm there studying, and torg0th crushes in EV but runs really bad.

Charles Hawk: What was the number one thing which improved you the most from a once $60 low stake reg, to a now, $1000 high stake player who can beat the rake and more against other regs? Is it all just down to studying GTO, or is there more to it than that?

307th: Well, currently my EV against regs at 5s+ is about 0.3% over 7.9kish games, so it's not like I'm beating them for way more than the rake. It still fluctuates, so it could still go below 0% (although I hope it'll fluctuate the other way).

There's no one thing I improved the most. I've always been trying to beat people for as much as possible, which led me to improve anything I could think of even when I was already beating up the people I was battling pretty hard. So if I tried to think about what separates me from myself when I was in $30's, it's basically "everything" - every area of my game has improved a ton since then.

Charles Hawk: Could you be as successful without the use of: preflop charts and/or random generators for pf decisions?

307th: I don't use random preflop generators. I do have preflop charts but I don't use them while playing very much since they're too slow. I mostly go off of memory of the charts, which isn't perfect but is good enough (although I should really take some time to memorize them better). So losing charts and random number generators wouldn't hurt me at all.

Charles Hawk: What are your hobbies are? Do you have any "off-poker" goals/dreams?

307th: I don't have any hobbies really, I've generally avoided them since I felt they would take energy way from poker. That's probably not actually true though. I'm going to spend time off anyway, so it's probably better to spend it on something that feels productive and rewarding.

The closest thing to a hobby is I enjoy watching competitive super smash bros melee. I've started practicing it solo since I find it fun and easy to do, but I haven't gone to any tournaments. I should probably do that, although maybe after I get into 1ks.

I have a bunch of ideas for what I want to do after poker, but for anything really ambitious I generally find I regret saying it out loud unless it's already done or at least most of the way there. I tend to overestimate myself so I try to keep my trap shut until I have results although I don't always remember to do that.

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Part 3 (the last one) comming next week. Topic: 1k shots