Tuesday, March 04, 2008

A month of grinding

I finally got around to switching from Limit to No-Limit Hold'Em at the beginning of Feb, I wish I'd done it sooner. I'm fortunate to be sharing an apartment in BA with an extremely talented NL200 and up grinder (and 2+2er) who's coached me a little. Watching him play has been a huge learning experience too.

I'm also trying to watch at least one cardrunners video per day. Again, invaluable. I still can't bring myself to read the strategy forums over at twoplustwo.com. Hopeully during March I can at least manage a few hours per week reading the small stakes NL forums, it has to be +EV.

I've set myself the target of winning at 4-5PTBB/100hands over 50,000 hands at $50NL before moving up to the $100NL tables. Kind of an apprenticeship type thing.

After 14,000 hands or so all was on track, then I switched to Everest Poker, a site riddled with euro-fish, and things started to go pear-shaped. Some sick beats, some tilt-induced bad play and I was running at just 1.2PTBB/100 over 20,000 hands. At the months end (nearly 30,000 hands) I finished at +2.53PTBB/100. Pretty mediocre stuff, but the sampl size is small so I can't really draw any solid conclusions.



As you can see from the below stats I'm playing 16/12 "ABC TAG" (Straight-forward, Tight Agressive) poker, and am very nitty about table selection. At these limits this is enough to give me a significant edge.....especially as my post-flop play improves.



I've jumped around various sites taking some good bonuses, and the occassional kickback from Poker Savvy, so in total I can add $950 to the winnings column of $815 for a total of +$1765 for the month. Certainly not a fortune, but I'm happy enough with the start.

A bigger positive is that at least I played 30,000 hands in a month, I probably haven't managed that for a year. I'm motivated and enjoying the game again. Now that I have access to an extra monitor I can play 6-9 tables pretty comfortably, so it should be no proplem getting in 50,000 hands in a month from now on.

Some random things I've learned during the month:

I'm very prone to tilt, so have to force myself to take a break for half an hour after a series of bad beats.

I tend not to play well after 2 hours or so, so force myself to sit out and get some fresh air for a couple of orbits every 2 hours.

I don't iso-raise limpers enough. This can almost be done with any 2 cards from late position...great for image/meta-game if we get to a showdown. It will also help get me away from the nitty 16/12 predictable game I'm playing.

I frequently forgot to look at stacksizes of my likely callers when raising preflop and c-betting post flop (a throughback to my limit poker days). I should certainly be c-betting slightly smaller against shortstackers for example: they will almost always give you an honest response to your bet (raise or fold) no matter what size it is....so make it less when you miss the flop.

Finally: don't bother getting it all-in with aces or kings on a dry flop at Everest, the fish will almost always suck out on you ;-).

2 comments:

Razboynik said...

??? Can you post ocassionally ?????
Even if the poker isn't going very well, you can post about life in Argentina and about your farm ;-)

Perpetual_Traveller said...

Ha! Done.

Poker's been going reasonably well, I guess I just haven't been feeling too inspired by much as of late.