All the Summer's poker news (Part Two)
...So I took a break. I was like "I'm gonna have a couple of weeks away from poker, I'm gonna re-read Matthew's book, browse the ITH Forum and spent a lot of time analysing my Poker Tracker stats" (Poker Tracker is a programme that downloads all your hand histories from the online poker sites and creats a massive database of them. From that it'll give you all sorts of useful statistics such as how often "Player X" check-raises the turn, for example. It'll also give you stats more pertinant to yourself like how much money you're loosing by overplaying AJ offsuit from early position. Basically it's an absolute must for any vaguely serious internet player. But anyway, I digress.)
Those of you who are aware of my fanaticism of poker are likely to be thinking "What the hell? Pinky couldn't stay away from poker for two days let a lone two weeks". Well, you're right I managed just over one day!
I did feel, however, that I went back to the tables with a much better perspective of things. Up till this point things had been kind of snowballing: The start was very gradual, but once I'd moved up a few limits, had gathered some deposit bonuses and was able to see some meaningfull profits materialising, it was as if my path to becoming a world class poker player was only a few similar steps away. Having had this fairly large collapse of bankroll gave me something of a reality check. The path to becoming a sucessful poker player does not happen overnight. It doesn't even happen over-summer! It's gonna take a lot of consistanly hard work and if things start going right that doesn't mean you can take your foot of the gas or play anything less than your 'A Game'. One guy on the ITH Forum has a post-it on his monitor which simply asks: "Is this my A Game?". I think that's one of the best things to be constantly asking yourself while you're playing. It's all to easy to lapse in self disciplin and start making bad calls.
So when I first went back I played a lot of really low limit stuff - 'fun stuff'. I played a lot of Omaha Hi/Low and even some 7 Card Stud. When I started taking things a bit more seriously my thoughts returned to rebuilding my bankroll.
I knew I would struggle to have the patcience to go stright back to limit but I had very little no-limit experince so I was reluctant to go straight into NL ring games. A reasonably large number of people on the ITH Forum play SNGs ("Sit and Go". These are most commonly one-table mini-tournaments (sometimes two or three tables). All 10 players pay a flat entry fee and the top three finishers get paid out of the prize pool, usually on a %50, %30, %20 ratio) From what I'd gethered these could be quite profitable and there was usually a choice between limit and no-limit. This seemed ideal, so I started playing the $10 dollar ones (+$1 entry fee).
Since then I have been playing a lot of these and, more recently, I've started playing low buy-in NL ring games also. So far this seems to have been working out reasonably well and I'm gradually on the road to recovery (I hope). I'm also going to start playing more larger tournaments as there is the potential for very large wins in these and it helps in providing a bit of variety. At the lower buy-in NL ring games, from what I have gathered so far and from what I have read of other people's experiences, if one is patient there is a decent amount of money to be made from other people's mistakes alone. In fact, it seems that one could build one's bankroll from small to medium in size much more quickly playing low-stakes NL rather than low-limit. My feeling is, however, that things would change once you have a reasonable sized bankroll and could be playing higher-stakes NL or higher-limit. I'm speculating here, but I'd imagine there would be an optimal bankroll size at which point it would be more profitable for you to switch from playing NL to limit, assuming you played each equally well. I'd like to ask some of the higher stakes players on the ITH Forum from each of the disciplins what there thoughts are on this.
Well that's pretty much where things stand at the moment, but there are still some stories of this Summer's live poker sessions to come.
Laters
Those of you who are aware of my fanaticism of poker are likely to be thinking "What the hell? Pinky couldn't stay away from poker for two days let a lone two weeks". Well, you're right I managed just over one day!
I did feel, however, that I went back to the tables with a much better perspective of things. Up till this point things had been kind of snowballing: The start was very gradual, but once I'd moved up a few limits, had gathered some deposit bonuses and was able to see some meaningfull profits materialising, it was as if my path to becoming a world class poker player was only a few similar steps away. Having had this fairly large collapse of bankroll gave me something of a reality check. The path to becoming a sucessful poker player does not happen overnight. It doesn't even happen over-summer! It's gonna take a lot of consistanly hard work and if things start going right that doesn't mean you can take your foot of the gas or play anything less than your 'A Game'. One guy on the ITH Forum has a post-it on his monitor which simply asks: "Is this my A Game?". I think that's one of the best things to be constantly asking yourself while you're playing. It's all to easy to lapse in self disciplin and start making bad calls.
So when I first went back I played a lot of really low limit stuff - 'fun stuff'. I played a lot of Omaha Hi/Low and even some 7 Card Stud. When I started taking things a bit more seriously my thoughts returned to rebuilding my bankroll.
I knew I would struggle to have the patcience to go stright back to limit but I had very little no-limit experince so I was reluctant to go straight into NL ring games. A reasonably large number of people on the ITH Forum play SNGs ("Sit and Go". These are most commonly one-table mini-tournaments (sometimes two or three tables). All 10 players pay a flat entry fee and the top three finishers get paid out of the prize pool, usually on a %50, %30, %20 ratio) From what I'd gethered these could be quite profitable and there was usually a choice between limit and no-limit. This seemed ideal, so I started playing the $10 dollar ones (+$1 entry fee).
Since then I have been playing a lot of these and, more recently, I've started playing low buy-in NL ring games also. So far this seems to have been working out reasonably well and I'm gradually on the road to recovery (I hope). I'm also going to start playing more larger tournaments as there is the potential for very large wins in these and it helps in providing a bit of variety. At the lower buy-in NL ring games, from what I have gathered so far and from what I have read of other people's experiences, if one is patient there is a decent amount of money to be made from other people's mistakes alone. In fact, it seems that one could build one's bankroll from small to medium in size much more quickly playing low-stakes NL rather than low-limit. My feeling is, however, that things would change once you have a reasonable sized bankroll and could be playing higher-stakes NL or higher-limit. I'm speculating here, but I'd imagine there would be an optimal bankroll size at which point it would be more profitable for you to switch from playing NL to limit, assuming you played each equally well. I'd like to ask some of the higher stakes players on the ITH Forum from each of the disciplins what there thoughts are on this.
Well that's pretty much where things stand at the moment, but there are still some stories of this Summer's live poker sessions to come.
Laters
posted by Pinky @ 2:43 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home