Today we’re gonna review the latest course from Upswing Poker: High Stakes MTT Sessions With Nick Petrangelo. We’ll walk you through the course in detail and share the pros and cons.
At the bottom of this review, you’ll find an exclusive Upswing bonus for CountingOuts readers only.
After reviewing Nick Petrangelo’s 1st course, Winning Poker Tournaments I’ve been anxiously awaiting a chance to watch and review the sequel to his advanced tournament poker training, High Stakes MTT Sessions by Upswing Poker.
Table of Contents
Who is Nick Petrangelo
If you’ve been living in a hole and don’t know who Nick Petrangelo is, you’ve been missing out on tournament wisdom from one of the great poker tournament strategists.
Nick has won over 23 million in poker tournament winnings and is currently 30th on the all-time money list.
He is a world class player with 2 World Series of Poker bracelets. And one of those wins, the 2018 $100K No Limit Hold’em High Roller event, was his biggest live tournament score of $2,910,227. Online, Nick goes under the nickname caecilius.
So now that you know Nick, let’s get to it, here’s my review of High Stakes MTT Sessions.
High Stakes MTT Sessions Course Overview
High Stakes MTT Sessions contains over 20 hours of Nick reviewing advanced multi-table tournament (MTT) strategy with a heavy focus on hand reviews.
Nick recorded his entire PokerStars SCOOP series where he multi-tables a range of $1k-25k tournaments. He filtered out any boring hands and provides a detailed analysis on the tough and fun hands.
What’s the Difference Between Winning Poker Tournaments and High Stakes MTT Sessions?
Nick Petrangelo’s first training course, Winning Poker Tournaments is more of a structured approach to learning different aspects of the game through a rigid lesson plan. WPT has a heavy use of solvers, hand range charts, and a focus on theory.
Nick’s second course, High Stakes MTT Sessions has some structured theory, but is more about watching Nick play. You get to hear how he makes decisions on the fly watching real hands with practical application of strategies. There is no use of solvers and it is more intuitive and fun as he explains both winning hands and mistakes he should have played differently.
Both courses compliment each other nicely and offer different learning styles.
Course Walkthrough
What to expect in the Winning Poker Tournaments course
The course is broken up into five different sections:
- Introduction Videos
- Themed Play & Explains
- Multiway Pots
- Blind vs Blind Postflop
- ICM & Bubble Play
- Sessions
- Early Stages
- Middle Stages
- Late Stages
- Hand History Review
- PartyPoker 2k Progressive Knockout Win
- PokerStars 1k High Roller Victory
- Live Play
Course Sections: Introduction Videos
This section contains brief videos where Nick explains:
- How he uses randomization – Nick actually uses a random number generator on a second screen and an interesting technique to help approximate realistic frequencies)
- Linear vs polar ranges and how he will discuss different strategies for each
- The difference between Winning Poker Tournaments and High Stakes MTT Sessions
Course Sections: Themed Play & Explains
The Themed Play & Explains section contains about 5 hours of content that reviews commonly misunderstood spots like:
- MTT multi-way hand situations
- MTT blind versus blind scenarios
- MTT ICM implications and optimal strategy
- MTT money-bubble play
Course Sections: Sessions
The Sessions section contains 10 hours (17 videos) of multi-tabling sessions broken down into early, middle, and late stage play.
Course Sections: Hand History Review
The Hand History Review section contains 5 hours (10 videos) of every hand Nick played in two tournaments that he won:
- 2k Progressive KO on Party Poker
- 1k High Roller Victory on PokerStars
Course Sections: Live Play
Unlike other course sections where Nick’s commentary and analysis are added to poker videos after they occurred, in this section, Nick does live commentary.
The Live Play section contains 3 hours (6 videos) during a Sunday when he won a $2k High Roller event
High-Stakes MTT Sessions Review
Pros: Here’s what we liked about the course
- Nick is a good communicator and has a likeable personality that is fun to watch
- You get access to the Winning Poker Tournaments private Facebook group to discuss tournament strategy
- Nick shows you how pros think about the hand ranges of their opponents
- He shows his professional randomization method in order to have an unexploitable GTO approach to decisions
- Good tactics on handling short stacked opponents
- Interesting strategies on how to approach knockout/bounty tournaments
- There’s a good balance between live commentary as well as after the fact hand analysis
- The Themed Play section provides a good review of commonly misunderstood spots
- The video player allows you to speed up or slow down videos to match your own pace of learning
Cons: Here’s what can be improved
- If you don’t like learning concepts through detailed poker hand analysis this course may not be for you.
- In some sessions, it may be hard to follow the multi-tabling action on a mobile device because 6 tables are on the screen at once. But Nick does a good job explaining the action.
- It would be nice if Nick made his bed in the background before filming (once you notice you can’t stop thinking about it!)
- Just like Winning Poker Tournaments, this is an advanced poker course and some beginner players may be overwhelmed by the concepts
Overall, this is an excellent course from an elite tournament coach and will definitely help improve any players multi-table tournament results.