Despite having tried other modalities such as Hyper Turbos SNGs 6max and MTTs, it was by Cash Game that Irishman Alan Finn fell in love and, since he decided to become professional, has excelled as a focused and extremely consistent player.
At Metagame since July 2021, Alan has met the team through a Twitch broadcast in which he heard about MDA-based and exploitable strategies. At that time Alan, who was stuck in the NL50 and trying to climb to the NL100, understood that metagame’s good theoretical level would accelerate his development and, in turn, his in-game win rate, as he had never done An MDA job before.
And that’s exactly what happened.
In a year and a half, the player left Tier 2 for Tier 1, where he has played NL200 and NL500. In addition, he recorded some important achievements such as: he earned $15,800 in August this year and in November played 183,000 hands and cleared the rakeback challenge twice for a score of $10,000.
“My game has evolved immensely since joining the team. Mostly on the aggression side and knowing what nodes to attack because of overfold etc. Knowing the numbers in how pool acts vs what they should be doing compared to GTO was a game changer for me. Building confidence around that has made that process so much easier because you know you are generating EV by attacking this. The same thing applies to underbluffed spots. Knowing where the pool under bluffs has made decisions on turns and rivers for example so much easier”.
The large volume of hands played monthly has caused Alan to conquer the Leaderboard System a few times and, according to him, the combination of work on and off the tables is largely responsible for this feat. “I try to have the best possible habits like meditating, exercising and having a balanced diet because they are important areas for those who play poker full time.”
The player also evaluated the advantages and disadvantages of heavy volume. “I think being able to play high volume and perform well while doing that is good for your win rate. Always pushing your boundaries too is good because you find out how much more you are capable of. It just made me more of a well-rounded professional in my opinion. Disadvantages and I feel this is the main one, being capped at 200nlz. 500nlz rarely runs so if I want to play higher stakes which I for sure do, I need to transition to reg tables and that might take some time to get used”.
Alan Finn met Poker as a teenager when he met with a group of friends every Friday to play 2-3 €10 buyin’ Sit’n Go games and the first three paid. “Back then I found it very competitive and now, looking back, it’s funny to see how things have changed since then.”
The decision to go proceed came when he really understood that he could make a living through the game. “I’ve always loved playing Poker and it made me realize what I wanted to do with my life. I just had to understand how to do this which is undoubtedly the hardest part. Many want to become professionals, but do not want to put the work that is necessary to make this a reality. This game turned me into a person i’m not sure if any other desktop could have done,” Alan said.
Alan said the Hyper Turbos SNGs 6max was an interesting format to play although at the time he didn’t realize how much variation was involved in it and struggled with it most of the time, using simple enough preflop + postflop strategies.
“My mindset now compared to back then is on a whole different level and I think if I ever had to revisit that format I would do better. MTTs was a brief spell where I was still trying to find out what worked for me but at the end of the day, cash games were always my bread and butter.”
