How to study poker: What are the best ways to consume a BBZ Poker Bundle?

You might have noticed that our bundle offerings have increased over the past few weeks, with exciting new additions in the Luckyfish Bundle, Fintan Bundle, Spraggy Bundle and the brand new TheWakko Bundle.

Perhaps you’re thinking of getting one to help you take your game to the next level (good idea!). Perhaps you’ve even picked one out that you’re going to purchase (great choice!).

But what should you do once you’ve purchased a training bundle from BBZ Poker?

What are the best ways to go about studying a bundle containing 10+ hours of coaching?

One person who can answer that for you is BBZ community member ‘TheRobRide’, better known in his real life as 22-year-old Robert Kjellström. The student from Uppsala, Sweden recently purchased Jordan ‘bigbluffzinc’ Drummond’s BBZ Bundle for just $99.

Three days later he took down a tournament for $1,645. “It’s already paying off!” he told the BBZ Discord.

Here, Kjellström tells us why he chose to grab the BBZ Bunde and how he set about studying it, plus he gives some tips on how you could study your bundle effectively when you decide to get your own.

BBZ Blog: Hey Robert, congrats on your win! Before we get into how you studied the BBZ Bundle, can you tell us a bit about how your first discovered poker and what your journey has been like so far?

Robert ‘TheRobRide’ Kjellström: Sure! My first encounter with poker happened when I was about 10 years old when my uncle showed me Full Tilt. I’d play sit&gos for play money but obviously, I was way too young to really grasp the concept of it. It wasn´t until I was 17 that I came across a Jaime Staples video on Youtube of some highlights from a Pokerstars tournament. After watching a couple more videos I was completely hooked and poker was all I could think about. On my 18th birthday, I opened my own account and since then I´ve played poker consistently up until now.

Like a lot of other poker players, my journey has been an absolute rollercoaster, especially when I started out. For a long time, I didn´t have any sort of bankroll management and I loved taking shots way too much. I think this helped me improve at poker faster, but it was terrible for my wallet. This led to a gambling problem that lasted for almost two years. This is something I try to be very open about so other people also can feel comfortable talking about their gambling problems. After being real with myself and talking with my friends and family about my addiction, I can now play poker without feeling the need to play the highest stakes that I can afford. Today I have a legit bankroll management strategy which is a must if you actually want to take poker seriously.

This has paid off big time for me with 2022 being my most profitable year by far, getting both my biggest live cash and online cash in the last couple of weeks.

And the online score came just after you’d purchased the BBZ Bundle?

Yeah. What makes the score even more fun is the fact that I purchased the BBZ bundle only a couple of days before winning the tournament and I could feel that my play was better than usual in a lot of spots where I previously was unsure of how to play.

How did you first discover BBZ and what led to you purchasing the bundle?

I’ve been consuming the free BBZ content on YouTube and Twitch for a long time, which also has helped a lot. I´ve had the dream to play poker professionally for the last three years but I never really took to step to improve my game to the next level until last summer. I finally felt that I had the time and the right mindset to approach the challenge of taking poker more seriously.

Since then, I´ve just been trying to improve my game as much as possible and decided to take the next step with the BBZ Bundle. I chose the BBZ Bundle for two main reasons: the fact that I had been consuming BBZ content for a while now through the free channels, so I knew that the style of coaching that BBZ uses fitted me personally. And the bundle is just so affordable in regard to what you actually get out of it. $99 is an investment that most people can afford, and it will give you an insane amount of value in the long run if you take poker and studying seriously.

How did you go about studying the bundle?

Since the bundle includes a lot of content, I’ve been trying to approach studying in a way that helps me fix my biggest leaks first while also focusing on spots where I know that the majority of the player base is weak and there’s a lot of money to be made. One example of this is multiway pots. Multiway pots are not as well studied as heads-up pots are which makes this a pretty common situation where you easily can get an edge on your opponent.

My second tip for studying is kind of boring but it has to be said. Study the basics ALOT and study them before you take on more advanced spots. When I say study the basics I mean stuff such as your pre-flop ranges, ICM, blind vs blind play, 3-betting and squeezing. These are common spots that you will find yourself in a lot while playing. So, knowing the optimal play is important or you will be losing a lot of money. Just try to not get ahead of yourself and understand your own level so you study the right spots.

Do you have any tips on the study process for people thinking of buying a bundle?

My tips for the actual studying process are to only study when you are 100% concentrated and can stay focused. If you find yourself looking at your phone or doing something else while studying rather than paying attention to what is being said, then it´s better to just pause the video, stop what you´re doing and take a break. In poker, it´s so important to understand the entire concept of the situation since every little variable can make a big difference in what is the optimal play. This makes it very important to always listen to everything that´s being said since missing a bit of information can be critical for the result.

So, just take a break if you´re having a hard time concentrating and just come back later instead. Taking consistent breaks also helps with not getting burnt out and unmotivated. Studying and playing poker is a marathon so you can’t expect to learn everything you want right away. If you want to be the best at something then consistency is the key.

To achieve consistency, I recommend making studying a part of your routine while also finding ways to keep it fresh and fun. Don’t always study in the exact same way. If you do that it will most likely get boring after a while. Coming from someone who is studying didactics and pedagogy at university, I promise that making sure that you study in different ways is helpful for almost everybody.

Something that also personally works for me is taking notes by hand. If I take notes by hand, I find myself a lot more concentrated on whatever I’m studying and it´s easier to stop and realize when I’m not fully understanding something. It also just helps the information stay in my head and I can also look at my notes when I have some free time over to refresh my memory. Repetition is of course important when studying any subject and this includes poker.

When you were playing the tournament you won, do you remember any moments where you used what you’d learned from the BBZ Bundle?

There were three main things that I used during the tournament win that I got better at from the BBZ Bundle.

The first is multi-way squeezing. As most people know, being aggressive is one of the many things that makes a good poker player. Squeezing multi-way to either just take down the blinds and the dead money in the middle or make it a heads-up pot is a great way to be aggressive on the table. Understanding when to squeeze vs when to call was something that the bundle helped with especially. The bundles offer a good and for me a new perspective on how to think about squeezing.

The second thing (as mentioned earlier) was multi-way pots. I have not done any excessive amount of multi-way pot studying but I feel like the little I have done has helped me so much compared to the actual time spent studying.

The last, but probably the most important in a tournament win, is the ICM studying that I got from the bundle. With five people left, my stack was almost double the size of second place and I felt that I used the advantage of having a big stack on a final table really well to bully around the other stacks and take down all the pots by raising pre-flop in the right positions and to put pressure on middle-sized stacks trying to ladder, while also being able to hunt the bounties of the short stacks.

In the BBZ Bundle, the fact that two videos from the ICM section are from a PKO tournament was also very helpful in this instance since it was very fresh in my head. Remembering what to do was quite easy and it was in some places directly applicable and really easy to use to my advantage.

What are your plans in poker for the future?

My plans for poker in the future are quite simple. I want to keep grinding up the stakes. I´ve made my way from micro-stakes up to mid-stakes now and the goal is just to go as far as I can and make a living playing poker. I love the game and I’m more motivated than ever to improve my game through studying. In the coming year, I´m hoping to take my game to the next level and have a good time doing it.