When it comes to online tournament players, few today enjoy the respect and esteem of Benjamin Rolle.
As a top regular player, the active German, nicknamed “bencb789”, then expanded his activities by dedicating himself to the supervision of educational content for the poker school “Raise Your Edge”, whose trainer he is to this day.
In the last few days Rolle posted his MTT chart on Twitter with some hints on the path he took to achieve the (sensational) results you can see below.
That’s gold from someone like him.
The graph
And here is the amazing MTT chart of ‘bencb789’. As you can see, the German grinder has amassed less than $4 million in earnings in less than thirteen thousand tournaments!
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Results from room to room
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keep it simple
In a repeated tweet, Rolle explains that he started the Spin & Go from the bottom. The decline of the SuperNova Elite led him to focus on tournament play.
“In the last 2-3 years I have streamed 98% of my sessions. I’ve shown everything in the streams, mutlibrated 20-25x while following the streams chats and setups, and kept winning. When Raise Your Edge caught on, I became a businessman playing poker and as a result my volume dropped significantly. Because of this situation, I don’t have enough time to study my opponents as well as I would like, but that’s okay.”
Rolle explains that his recipe to keep winning is all about simplicity:
“How do I keep winning? I keep things simple, which is what I teach in my classes. Removing all elements of complexity from my game was key to keep winning.”
The German describes the aspects of the game where simplicity becomes the weapon of victory:
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“A solid, no-nonsense strategy is more important than trying to achieve GTO perfection. I focus on things that solvers cannot teach. Finding weak opponents, exploiting them, considering future play and advantage, identifying general field trends, and adjusting my play accordingly.
understand why
Rolle goes on to say that support software has to come after understanding the rationale for what’s being done at the green table.
“First understand why you do certain things, and then use Solver as a supporting tool. Of course you need to know the basic theory, but I always say, “You need to understand gto poker, taking advantage of your opponents will make you money. The right mix I would say is 20% GTO, 80% exploitation.”
There are some specific situations that need to be examined:
“I also focus on the commercials that bring the biggest profits. Good value bets, solid preflop ranges, ICM knowledge and good folds. Your win rate is mostly in these things and not in deciding whether to bet the 12.5% pot or the 13.7% pot to earn 0.001bb EV.
Don’t play perfect, but play better than your opponents
With the presentation of his results, Rolle also wants to dispel the myth of the “perfect game”.
“Another priority is to understand and play the spots better than most opponents. Warning: being better than others does not mean playing perfectly. The spots where you can play better than your opponents are blind wars, multiways, preflop and postflop spots where the ICM comes into play. These are difficult things to study, you need very powerful hardware and it often takes a long time before you give the solution. But the return on investment – even if it’s just time – is guaranteed because most players are really terrible at these spots. It takes little practice to become better than most opponents at these aspects of the game. It’s a big time investment.”
Ben adds that streaming his sessions is definitely a downside as it requires attention. The downsides also concern his game, which opponents can study with open cards if he can play some late stages during the streaming sessions.
Way of thinking
After Rolle wrote that streaming his sessions is a disadvantage because it requires attention and because opponents can study his play openly when he arrives late in the stage, Rolle underscores the importance of mindset and best-playing:
“An achievement is not the same as a great achievement. You must try to hold your A-Game for as long as possible on each game. ”
Finally, ‘bencb789’ summarizes the main points that allowed him to draw the impressive graph you see above:
- Strong mind game: Work on your mindset when you’re not sitting at the table.
- Be a merciless beast when it comes to value betting
- Make good folds and stay solid before the flop.
- Understand blind vs. blind dynamics and multiway pots.
- Understand where your opponent can be exploited.
