The Professor Challenge – Day 4: New Room, New Adventure
Updated: Sep 3
The decision has been made.
After spending some time grinding the NL4 Flash pool on NutsPoker, I decided to move the challenge somewhere else.
If you haven’t read the previous update yet, I recommend starting from 👉 The Professor Challenge – Day 3: A Reality Check at NL4 Flash, because that’s where I explained why I started questioning whether that environment was really the best place to build this bankroll.
This is the next chapter.
A new room.
A new player pool.
And a completely different format.
📑 Table of Contents
💸 Cashing Out from NutsPoker
Before moving to Red Dragon Poker, I withdrew the entire bankroll from NutsPoker.
I honestly expected the process to be a bit more complicated, but everything went smoothly.
Well… almost.
Part of the withdrawal confirmation page was displayed in Russian, so I had to open Google Translate just to make sure I wasn’t clicking something completely different.
Fortunately, after only a couple of minutes, the money arrived safely in my TRON wallet.
A very smooth cashout experience overall.
🐉 Why I Chose Red Dragon Poker
The decision wasn’t based on a single winning or losing session.
After spending more time in the NL4 Flash pool, I simply felt the games were much tighter than I originally expected.
There were still recreational players, of course, but the average regular seemed considerably stronger than what I wanted for this challenge.
Red Dragon Poker was the obvious alternative.
From everything I’ve heard—and from the players I trust—it currently offers one of the softest regular cash-game environments available.
If the purpose of this challenge is to grow a bankroll by making good decisions, then game selection has to be part of those decisions.
Sometimes choosing a better table is worth far more than playing better poker.
💰 Why I Added Another $90
Some of you will immediately notice something.
The bankroll on Red Dragon Poker is larger than the bankroll I withdrew from NutsPoker.
That wasn’t a random decision.
Dragon Poker doesn’t offer a standard $0.02/$0.05 NL5 table.
The smallest regular game is 0.2 / 0.4 / 0.8 CNY with a 0.2 CNY ante, which effectively plays bigger than a normal NL5 game.
Moving there with the bankroll I had would have meant starting with very few buy-ins.
I spent quite a while thinking about this because I didn’t want to change the nature of the challenge.
In the end, I decided to add another $90, bringing the bankroll to approximately $189 before starting the first session.
My goal isn’t to keep adding money whenever things become difficult.
This was simply an adjustment required by the stake structure on the new poker room.
From now on, the challenge continues exactly as before.
🎥 First Session on Red Dragon Poker
The first session is complete.
The result wasn’t particularly exciting.
I finished down around one buy-in, mainly after losing a couple of standard preflop all-ins, including AK against pocket eights.
Nothing dramatic.
Just poker.
I also made several mistakes myself.
The software feels completely different, the games have antes, and I still need to understand the population tendencies before feeling comfortable.
One small note regarding the bankroll.
Although I generated around $1.80 in rakeback during the session, Red Dragon Poker credits rakeback every Monday, so it isn’t included in today’s bankroll yet.
📊 Current Bankroll
Starting Bankroll: ~$189
Session Result: approximately -$5
Pending Rakeback: approximately $1.80 (credited on Monday)
Current Bankroll: approximately $184
👑 The Marquis of the River
I approve the move.
From what I’ve seen, Red Dragon Poker’s regular cash games are definitely softer than a fast-fold pool, so switching rooms makes perfect sense if the objective is to maximise long-term EV.
But I have one condition.
No more deposits.
Otherwise, the challenge slowly starts losing its original spirit.
I also watched today’s stream.
One piece of advice.
Always reload and keep at least 100 big blinds in front of you.
Ideally, I’d like to see you sitting with 200–300BB, because ante games become much easier to exploit with deeper stacks.
Right now, though, your bankroll doesn’t really allow that.
So playing around 100BB is absolutely fine for the moment.
The important thing is adapting to ante cash games.
They’re a very different game compared to standard no-ante cash tables, and learning those adjustments will probably have a much bigger impact than worrying about one losing session.
🏁 Final Thoughts
This wasn’t the most profitable session of the challenge.
But I don’t think it was the most important part either.
The important decision was changing environment.
Now the bankroll is on a poker room that, hopefully, offers a much softer player pool.
Whether that decision turns out to be correct…
We’ll find out over the next few sessions.
The Professor Challenge continues. 💪
Comments