From Flip Flops to High Stakes

Welcome to the blog. I'm starting this for one reason: I want to climb from low stakes online cash games all the way to high stakes — and I'd rather do it in public than in private. Receipts, screenshots, downswings, the lot.

If you're here for sanitized "I made $10k my first month" content, this isn't that. This is the actual grind — documented honestly, week by week, however long it takes.

Who I am and why I'm starting over

I used to be an MTT player. Years of live tournaments, airports, hotel rooms, the whole circuit. It was a great chapter — but it's a brutal lifestyle. Sleep schedule destroyed, structure non-existent, weeks away from home chasing variance with a 200-buy-in sample size that means almost nothing.

I'm done with that version of the grind.

I'm making the switch to online cash games for one reason: quality of life. Cash games let me play from home. They let me quit a session whenever I want. They let me have mornings, real food, a body that isn't running on tournament fumes. The variance is dramatically lower than MTTs, which means results actually mean something over a reasonable sample.

In tournaments you can play perfectly for six months and lose. In cash, if you're good, you know it within 50,000 hands.

Why Ibiza

I live in Ibiza. Most people picture this place as nothing but clubs and overpriced beach clubs, and yeah, that exists. But there's another Ibiza — quiet mornings, long swims, cheap menú del día spots inland, and the kind of headspace that's genuinely good for sitting down and grinding hands.

After years of hotel rooms, that matters. The whole point of switching to cash is to actually live somewhere instead of just passing through.

The goal

High stakes. Not "comfortable mid stakes." Not "covering rent." I want to be sitting in the games where the money actually matters and the players are sharks, and I want to belong there.

Coming from MTTs doesn't give me a free pass at cash. The skill set overlaps but it's not the same game. Postflop play matters way more, ranges are tighter, the math is different. So I'm starting at NL10 and treating this like the new discipline it is. Ego in the bin.

The path looks like this:

• NL10 → NL25 → NL50 → NL100 — the foundation stakes. Where you prove you can beat the game, not just run hot.
• NL200 → NL500 — mid stakes. The skill jump here is real and a lot of grinders stall out forever at this level.
• NL1k and beyond — the actual destination.

No timeline. I'm not going to tell you I'll be at NL500 by Christmas because I don't know that, and anyone who pretends to know is lying. What I can promise is the rules I'll follow to move up: a real win rate over a real sample, proper bankroll, and zero shot-taking-and-praying.

I'll publish my results every month. Graphs, win rates, hands played, the lot. If I'm stuck at a stake for six months, you'll see that too.

The strategy

Three pillars. That's it.

1. Volume with intent. I'm targeting 20,000+ hands a month. But volume without review is just gambling faster. Every session ends with at least 15 minutes flagging hands I wasn't sure about.

2. Study more than most people do. Roughly 1 hour of study per 3 hours of play. Solver work, range drilling, watching better players think out loud. I'll share what's actually moving the needle and what's a waste of time.

3. Bankroll rules I don't break. 30 buy-ins minimum to play a stake, drop down at 20. This is the single rule most people break when they're losing — which is exactly when you can't afford to. Shot-taking has its place, but only with money I can lose without flinching.

Moving-up criteria

So I don't fool myself: I only move up a stake when I've hit 30 buy-ins for the next level AND posted a positive win rate over at least 30,000 hands at the current one. Both, not either.

What this blog will be

Weekly updates on hands played, results, what I'm studying, and what Ibiza life looks like around it. Occasional deeper posts on strategy concepts I'm working on. Honest writing about variance and the mental side — coming from MTTs I know how brutal that part can be, and it's the part nobody talks about enough.

If any of that sounds interesting, stick around. Next post drops in a week with my starting bankroll, the sites I'm playing on, and the tracking setup I'm using.

Let's see how far this goes.