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You are playing poker on hard mode

Jakub · Five Card Guy

Recently, I had a student asking what I think about his strategy. He showed me a screenshot with 3,000 hands and asked, “What am I doing wrong?”

The reality is that 3,000 hands is nothing. You need a minimum of 30k hands to get any meaningful sample.

But it gets worse.

The same goes for your day-to-day results.

Getting lost in daily swings is the number one cause of suffering. You are essentially playing poker on hard mode.

Take Marcel for example. He's been playing PLO for over 20 years but struggled to get past the low stakes. Every shot he took ended in disaster, and he even tried short-stacking just so he could play higher stakes.

Over time, he developed a strong distaste for grinding and felt trapped. The daily swings were too much to handle. This showed in low volume and, at times, multi-week breaks from poker.

The truth is, this was self-inflicted. He was playing poker on hard mode.

In PLO6, daily swings of 5 buy-ins are super common. If you're constantly in pain due to natural swings of the game, you're obviously not going to have a great time and likely fail.

The most reliable solution I found is to check your results only once per month — and after your very last session of the month.

This frees up a lot of mental energy and lets you focus on the things that actually affect your win rate.

Jakub