Happy 2023 everyone!

As has come to be a tradition here on my blog, I’m starting the year with somewhat of a lengthy post, reflecting on the prior year and sharing goals for the upcoming one. I should look back at prior goals to see which ones I stuck to and which ones I set aside, but that’s not for today. Today, I plan to stick with the original plan and write about all the poker and life-related things going on for me.

So without any further adieu, let’s get into the meat of today’s post…

Solver School Update - Solver Masterclass

The first and most significant update I have is related to Solver School. As I shared last January, I started a poker business called Solver School. My goal in starting this business has been to share my solver and data skills with the poker community through content and data products.

The product that kicked everything off was my flagship course, the Solver Masterclass. My original goal was to codify all that I know about using solvers for poker study in the style of a college-level class, starting with foundational theory and building towards advanced applications. This turned out to be a Herculean effort that was far more difficult than I thought it was going to be. After going through all of this, I have infinitely more respect for anyone who creates content for a living after going through this myself. Battling motivation challenges, writer’s block, and imposter syndrome were really tough. But after countless hours of writing, recording, editing, and packaging it all together, I released something I was extremely proud of.

I released the course prior to finishing it and spent much of the rest of 2022 filling out the remainder of my syllabus. In total, I have released 9 distinct modules containing 112 videos that span over 40 hours. I look back on that and am amazed that I was able to crank all of that out.

I have been both excited and disappointed by the overall results. On the positive side, it’s amazing to me that there are a number of people from all around the world who have bought it. It’s something that I still find so cool — that someone can share their work broadly and there are individuals all around the world who are willing to purchase it. And the feedback that I’ve received has been great. I have a Discord group set up for those who have purchased the course, and the response that I’ve gotten has been incredibly positive. For that, I’m incredibly grateful.

On the negative side, I didn’t quite sell as many as I had originally hoped to last year. I’m not going to share exact numbers here, but I fell short of my goal by about 40%. Maybe I set my goals too high. That’s certainly possible. But I set out with the hope that this could turn into a full-time gig by the end of the year, and it hasn’t quite gotten there yet.

So what’s next for Solver School as we march into 2023?

I don’t quite have my roadmap for 2023 created yet. While I will plan to add more to the content library this year, it certainly won’t be 40+ hours worth of videos again. After going through this whole effort, I learned some important things about myself — the main one is that I don’t want to focus the majority of my time on content creation. I enjoy teaching and making videos to share knowledge, but solely creating content videos was draining and took me away from other things on which I’d like to focus. So expect somewhere in the neighborhood of ~10 hours of new content added to the library this year.

With the extra time, I’m going to focus on creating a secondary product and hopefully collaborating with other professionals in the poker space. I want that second product to be an interactive application. I do a lot of cool data work in my day job, and I think I can create some really useful tools that help people better analyze and visualize data in their own studies.

Solver School Update - New Product Announcement

The following section is lifted directly from the Solver School blog, but I know there are some people who will see it here and not there, so I’m cross-posting the section below.

I have added a 4-part series to the Masterclass. I’ve entitled it From Macro to Micro: Building an MTT Strategy Using Data.

I’m so excited about this latest module. I think it’s some of the best work within the entire course catalog. I also think that it stands up as a perfect complement to the theory that I outlined throughout the first modules of the Masterclass. As such, I’ve decided to package it up as a separate product for $199. If you’re not ready to plunge into buying the entire Masterclass library, this might be a good initial investment.

Over the 5 hours of videos within the course, I demonstrate step-by-step how you can use a solver to develop a simplified strategy that can be studied and executed at the table. From Macro to Micro is broken up into 4 parts:

• Part 1: Introduction of the formation, review of solver parameters, initial overview of the output data in Excel (pre-analysis)

• Part 2: Detailed examination of aggregate reporting in Excel (macro) – emphasis placed on identifying strategy considerations dependent on board types, stack size, and other variables

• Part 3: Examination of several individual solutions (micro) to develop range construction heuristics and identification of exceptions to strategies from Part 2

• Part 4: Strategy synthesis and simplification, deviation considerations, series wrap-up

Within the course, I use the example of a hijack (HJ) vs big blind (BB) formation at 50 BB stacks. I show you how to set up your solver game trees, build your own customized analysis with the aggregated output report, analyze the data at a macro- and micro-level, and synthesize everything into simplified, executable strategies. It’s a fully comprehensive process that can be replicated for any situation or node of the game tree to build your own strategy.

Included with the course videos, you will also get some additional materials to help you develop your own strategies:

• I have solved all 1755 strategically unique flops at 9 different stack-size and position combinations (UTG, HJ, and BTN vs BB at 25 BB, 50 BB, and 75 BB stack depths) and stored the data within 9 distinct GTO+ databases

• I have created a detailed Excel workbook to aggregate and analyze the data from all 9 data outputs at a macro level

Both of these outputs are included for free for anyone who purchases this course or the Solver Masterclass. This is an insane value. Seriously…the GTO+ databases alone will cost more than $199 if you were to purchase them from someone else.

This course will provide you with the roadmap you need to work within solvers and develop your own game plans. And while I demonstrate this using an MTT example, it’s flexible enough to apply to 6-max cash games, heads up, or really any other format of poker that you can use solvers to study. Head on over to the Solver School website to purchase.

My own poker journey

Thus far, I’ve shared a lot about Solver School. As far as my own poker journey is concerned, I’m pretty relieved to be putting 2022 behind me. I’ve been playing this game now for about 20 years, and this has been one of the more frustrating ones of my career.

The year started off great! In 2021, I decided to focus more on MTTs. And while I struggled in my first WSOP in 2021, I felt like I was progressing well. I had a few big scores in online tournaments in 2021 and won a Sunday major online tournament here in Michigan for $8K in February of 2022. But after that score, the rest of the year was a string of losing months that was really difficult to work through. I kept putting in the work off the tables, but I just lost…a lot.

I continued to play some cash on the side and booked a profitable year in those games, but I lost all of that profit and more playing MTTs. I just never seemed to be able to get anything going. I’d have a winning month and then get crushed the next few. I won my last online tournament before heading to the 2022 WSOP and then bricked all my events there for the 2nd straight year.

Apparently, this is completely normal for MTT players. I’ve heard that the variance is bonkers, but I feel like I’m getting kicked in the balls repeatedly playing these things. Quite honestly, I have no idea how any of you MTT grinders do it. I found myself constantly in doubt of my abilities, wondering if it was variance or whether I was any good at this game anymore.

I took a bit of time off from playing in December to get my head right, which helped me get my head straight. During that time, I went through Kevin Rabichow’s course - The Game Plan - which I highly recommend. If anything, I have too many projects on my plate. There’s just too much to study in this game, and I constantly found myself overwhelmed. That course helped me to organize my thoughts and put a structured study plan in place. As a result, I’m much more focused on how I’m building out my own strategy. You can get a glimpse of the beginnings of that thinking in my From Macro to Micro course. If you’ve consumed Rabichow’s course, you’ll probably recognize that it has influenced a lot of it.

As I move into 2023, I’m very focused on building out an MTT strategy that I can study and execute. That’s going to involve a lot of solver work, simplification of complex findings, and off-the-table training to make sure I’m executing the things that I learn in the lab.

I also plan to find a healthier mix of MTTs and Cash. While I still do believe that playing MTTs is quite attractive because of the potential for a huge score, cash games are where I feel most at home. I enjoy playing deep-stacked poker — it’s the format in which I’m most confident. Maintaining a good mix of both will be key to my overall enjoyment of this game. And when I return to the WSOP this summer for a 3rd time, I’m optimistic that it will translate into more success at the tables.

Family & Life

While poker was full of ups and downs, my family is always there as an amazing constant. My daughters turned 7 and 5 this year. Watching them grow into two amazing girls has continued to be the best and most rewarding thing in my life. The fact that I am able to work from home is the cherry on top of the sundae. The work-from-home shift is one of the few by-products of the pandemic that I am eternally grateful for because of all the time I get to spend with my girls. I can’t imagine ever going back to a job where I had to go to an office every day.

I started a new job over the summer. I mentioned in a prior post that I had started to do work with Andrew Seidman’s (aka BalugaWhale) company, Digital Reach Agency, as a part-time consultant. I had a great experience working with them, but some of the work I was engaged with started to dry up over the summer. When it was clear that they wouldn’t be able to afford to keep me much longer, I started engaging my network. As it turned out, a former company of mine, MarketBridge, has been growing like gangbusters and needed another senior analytics leader within the organization. Everything moved very quickly, but within a few weeks of re-engaging, I was back with the company again for a 2nd time.

I’ve been there for 6 months now, and things have been great so far. For one, I was able to stay remote. While MarketBridge is based back in the Washington, DC area, I’m able to do my job from Michigan and travel to the office every couple of months or so for a few days. The company has changed a bit since my first stint from 2012-2016. We do way more advanced analytics work than we did during my first tenure. Most of our prior work centered around reporting and ad hoc data analyses, while now, we are more focused on predictive work, such as forecasting and developing marketing mix or attribution models. The nicest part is that I feel engaged again at work, which is the first time in several years since that has happened.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t share updates about the new dog we welcomed into our family. I wrote about this in my post, but we got a yellow lab puppy in May. His name is Maize, after Michigan’s school colors. I grew up with dogs and thought I knew what I was getting into, but I must have forgotten how much work it was taking care of an 8-week old puppy! After a challenging summer training him, Maize has grown into an awesome dog. He’s my buddy and follows me around everywhere. At the moment, he’s in his normal spot sleeping on the chair in my office. Maize loves our walks around the neighborhood, exploring our yard to find sticks to chew, and eating — he’s more food-motivated than any dog I’ve ever met. Most importantly, my girls love him. He’s filled out our family nicely.

Blogging goals in 2023

As I shift gears into 2023, I’ve set some blogging goals for myself. I know that this blog is quite front-heavy with most of the content from 2020. But, I am hoping to change that a little. For the first time in a while, I feel like I have my head screwed on right. The pandemic knocked some things loose in my brain, and I think I was drifting somewhat for the past couple of years. I shared a bit of that here and here. I turned a corner over the last year or so, and have been slowly getting myself back on the right track.

For the first time in a while, I feel focused like my old self again. I remember the feeling I had when starting this blog in 2020. I had big goals and was determined to reach them. I continued to set goals over the past two years, but I let a lot of them slip. Maintaining motivation was a huge challenge. I drank too much, smoked too much pot, and was pretty directionless. But over the past year, I’ve identified and knocked out the negative habits one by one to the point that I’m fully primed and ready to take things on in 2023 in all areas, which includes this blog.

I do have a lot more going on now than I did in 2020 with Solver School and my professional career in data analytics. So I don’t see myself ever returning to a posting frequency of 1-2 times per month — it’s just not realistic. That said, I would like to post something here at least 1 time per quarter. My overall goal is 6 posts this year. Some will be a mixture of life and poker updates, like the one you’re reading now. But I’d also like to start publishing the data work I’m doing in my own poker studies. I’m in the midst of building out my own MTT strategy using some cool data analysis techniques. As I find interesting things (and as I have the time to do so), I will try my best to share some content here.

Finally, I plan to take down the products I have on my site at some point this year and shift some of them over to the Solver School page. The free resources will always be free. I would just like to lean more into this website as a personal blog and share all product-related items on my Solver School site.

Conclusion

Thanks again for taking the time to read my lengthy posts.

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If you have any questions, comments, or want to discuss anything, please feel free to reach out to me on any of those channels or email me here. Thanks for reading.

-Lukich