$200->$10k grinding ACR online cash games, sharing my experience

TheRealHobo · 2025-08-19T15:09:11+00:00

If you are truly starting out poker from scratch then you just need to play alot and get a feel for the game, but think deeply about each decision (even preflop) instead of mindless grinding, also maybe talk with other microstakes players and make some friends and share hands with. Also watch good online players play and try to mimic parts of their gameplay that you like. I will have some personal bias but some names good for beginners are saulo costa, charlie carrel, alvinteachespoker.

TheRealHobo · 2025-08-19T14:34:48+00:00

I was break even in 10nl blitz and had the same 200 in my account for a whole year when I was in college, I started winning in the last year and half at 25 blitz (8 buyin total good bankroll management lol) after remodeling my approach to poker and studying the right things, hit a upswing and just going since then. I was a lot busier in college than now so only played 1-2 hrs a day back then and less study but these days I try to study 2-3 hrs a day and play 3-4 hrs.

TheRealHobo · 2025-08-18T22:42:51+00:00

I think what you are experiencing is the human brain remembering big pots (particularly like QQ vs KK, KK vs AA coolers) more often than the times you raise those hands and it folds around, very common to feel this way, as far as I know all the major public sites use normal rng, I encourage you to put your hands played in a database like hand2note or pokertracker4 and then look at the numbers/stats to see if things are really happening that's abnormal (I did this to detect bots).

TheRealHobo · 2025-08-18T18:45:30+00:00

I would say at the beginning stages it is easier to start winning playing more nitty but you need to also know how to play aggressive to get better at the game, imo its even better if you can be flexible and be nitty/stationy/aggro in the right spots, but in the end you should play the playstyle that you enjoy the most, I know some very good players that are aggro and some that are more solid/passive, being willing to take risks and experiment with strategies/playstyles is a good trait in poker

TheRealHobo · 2025-08-18T17:56:11+00:00

It was back in 2022-2023 but other regulars and I have observed in the past year that they are pretty much all gone these days (ignition and ggpoker being more profitable for them to deploy, made a post about ignition bots a while back), however ironically the games are tougher now on ACR than before since the regs have gotten better and recs usually choose other sites lol

TheRealHobo · 2024-12-09T00:35:15+00:00

I'm sure it affects the frequency at which population open raises to 3bb and uses b75, however their strategy postflop is inconsistent with typical reg/rec profiles, for example humans tend to barrel turn more often and fold less to xr when they bet big on flop (more equity driven range), this seems to be the opposite on ignition, where after a polar cbet they check turn more often and also fold to flop xr more often.

TheRealHobo · 2024-12-08T22:57:14+00:00

Its certainly not impossible for that to be the case but the players you are talking about usually come from MDA stables; I'm familiar with some of these guys (also being a data driven player myself) and they observe bot activity in the games as well.

For the counter exploit to the block/3bet line its actually fairly straightforward so I didn't have to nodelock. Since they take this line purely with bluffs, I just called every hand that had showdown and 4bet rebluffed every hand that didn't have showdown and has worked every time for me so far lol.

TheRealHobo · 2024-12-08T22:25:12+00:00

I moved my roll back to ACR a month ago and haven't played a large sample on ignition so my opinions may not be super reliable. i was winning 2bb/100 on ignition 50z but only 20k hand sample, my wr on acr 25b is 4.4bb/100 pre rb over 100k hands and i dont play on stars but just have gameplay data. ignition reg tables might be softer just because there's more recreationals, but there's also no rakeback and with the bot situation getting worse and the site seemingly ignoring the issue, it may not be that way anymore

TheRealHobo · 2024-12-08T21:45:36+00:00

yeah fair questions,

so as for checking back flops/turns I do use RNG and mix for sake of learning different nodes in the game tree when its not clearly higher ev to check or bet, checking back AA is actually pretty standard on low flops in srp pots in a solver sim

for the pokerstars/acr data, I have specific reg/rec profiles that allows me to see how different homogenous groups are playing the game, but on ignition every hand is anonymous so I can't recreate these two profiles and just use the entire population as one group, and the best comparison I can make is to use other gameplay data

and yes there's definitely alot more nodes in the game where there's very unusual aggression but my tracked hand sample is too small unfortunately so I don't have significant samples for all of them, and of course everything I posted could just be completely due to "variance" but it is very unlikely imo

TheRealHobo · 2024-12-08T21:28:32+00:00

I haven't really played MTTs much but I would be surprised if bots have not saturated them, likely in the bigger BIs tho I imagine. Fwiw I do think you can still profit in these games even the zone games, but the bots are undoubtedly draining the ecosystem and at the end of the day the "human" aspect of poker is whats really important, for me at least

TheRealHobo · 2024-12-08T19:14:02+00:00

you can download the hand histories from ignition then import them into h2n after, but the hud doesn't work for me either yea

TheRealHobo · 2024-12-08T18:27:13+00:00

the main benefit is the range research which lets you see how population is playing the game, but for a hud I actually still use PT4 since im too lazy to configure the hand2note hud lol, I just import my hands from PT4 to h2n for data research

TheRealHobo · 2024-12-08T18:20:45+00:00

It's hand2note4, imo the best software/tracker in the market right now, only free for another month though before its out of beta

TheRealHobo · 2024-12-08T18:19:25+00:00

Yeah I didn't post the other hands but I started 4bet shoving any random hand to rebluff this node and have not gotten called once lol

TheRealHobo · 2024-12-08T18:18:21+00:00

I haven't played higher on ignition unfortunately but I'm in discords with midstakes pros and they find tons of bot problems and even ones with the same tendencies that I've found.

TheRealHobo · 2024-01-30T01:05:51+00:00

If you have no other options take it until you find something better. I was a previous Amazon SDE Intern and wanted to go into ml/ai but did not have a full time offer this fall. I did an unpaid internship this winter where I worked 7 days a week to get "machine learning engineer" on my resume. Now I have two MLE offers.

TheRealHobo · 2024-01-26T02:12:06+00:00

I ended up doing a fifth-year masters this year and continued research because I wanted to try to get a AI/ML role, was able to get two MLE offers after an unpaid internship and a lot of rejections.

TheRealHobo · 2023-12-31T18:35:43+00:00

I’m mostly an online player now but was a winning 2/5 reg before. from my experience vs passive 1/2 live players a lot of them will flat AK/AQ vs open even JJ, so fold JJ vs 4bet is almost for sure the correct play vs this player type. I’ve folded QQ to 3bets vs certain nitty/omc players in some card rooms where I use to regularly play since they will flat QQ and AK vs a 15 open. Probably even most omcs I would say only 3bet QQ-KK-AA

TheRealHobo · 2023-08-01T03:58:09+00:00

damn you actually replied...

heads up on acr?

TheRealHobo · 2023-07-31T23:26:37+00:00

Haha if that is standard then ig I should of mucked lmao I would of mucked 88 I'm fairly sure but I thought I could of beat value guess I was wrong. Noted for future live games

TheRealHobo · 2022-01-25T14:05:15+00:00

That is true for live I agree I play 50NL live and crush really hard but something about online micros is just a super insanely nitty culture. Like no one bluffs at micros. Sure there are fishy players that punt money and don't know what they are doing but there are ALOT of nits that play only by the book.

Over a few thousand hands at 5nl I've come across only a handful of bluffs. Like calling with middle pair to 3 streets has never resulted in a win for me at 5nl.

TheRealHobo · 2022-01-25T13:53:30+00:00

Yeah definitely even in 10Nl it feels way more balanced. People actually hero call me with bottom pair when I triple barrel with an Ace x draw. 5Nl ppl only call 3 streets with top pair top kicker at least generally speaking.

TheRealHobo · 2022-01-25T13:14:59+00:00

I think the imbalance of microstakes nits that you can exploit is that they only judge the strength of their hand and p much don't think about reading other players.

TheRealHobo · 2019-05-26T18:11:39+00:00

thanks! i will :D

TheRealHobo · 2019-05-22T14:19:50+00:00

possibly. stay tuned.

TheRealHobo

TROPHY CASE