Job Security. In a time when US unemployment is at it’s highest levels in decades one thing we as poker players ought to be thankful for is that we cannot lose our means of making a living due to anyone’s actions but our own. We cannot be fired, and if we lose money at work, well we have no one to blame but ourselves. Sure you can make excuses as most of us do for running bad and blame the poker gods all we want, but ultimately our luck will even out over our career and if we put in the proper amount of time, hours and dedication we will succeed and make money.
This is not necessarily true in other jobs and the fact that poker is for the most part (with the exception of a few tourney donk winners) a meritocracy where if you work hard and are good at your job you will succeed. Think about all the other people a typical 40 hour a week job employee has to depend on for his or her livelihood. First he has to impress someone enough for them to hire them. Then he has to work hard to keep his or her employer happy so that he won’t be fired. It’s not even enough that he is good at his job and gets his work done, he has to make sure he still looks like he’s busy even if he has no more work to do so he won’t appear lazy. He has to make sure he doesn’t say the wrong thing to his boss, or give some offhand comment that may offend him personally that may be detrimental to him getting a promotion. He may even work hard and do a good job with his work, but a coworker he is working with on a project slacks off and as a result makes him look bad in front of his boss. Even if he and his coworkers do a good job, this does not necessarily translate into being paid more. His boss may still fire him due to the recession hitting, or he may promote someone else that he enjoys working with better but doesn’t do quite as good of work as him or his hard work may just go completely unnoticed. In other words, the system is not setup fairly to reward the hardest and best workers with the highest pay. While poker is not perfect either in this regard, you have to agree that it is a much more fair system than the typical 40 hour a week career guy faces.
So next time you suffer a bad beat, or encounter a big losing streak think about this for a minute. Yeah sure you lost money, sure you got it in good, but as long as you practice half decent bankroll management at least you’ll still be able to go to work tomorrow and have the opportunity to make money working. A lot of others, about 10% of America to be exact, are not lucky enough to be able to say the same.
In case you missed them in the Superbowl.
In case you haven’t noticed I’ve been AWOL for the past six weeks. Blogging is kind of a vicious cycle where when I’m super busy I have all these things to blog about, but not much time to do it OR I have all the time in the world but nothing new is really going on in my life so I have nothing to blog about. I needed a little break from blogging anyways, but now I’m back and have all these fresh new things to talk about!
What have I been up to you say? Well, in mid-December I flew out to Philadelphia to visit an old college buddy of mine and spent a week hanging out with him seeing the sites and checking out Atlantic City for the first time. After that it was back to Seattle for a couple of days followed by a ten day trip back to the east coast to North Carolina to spend Christmas and New Years with my family. I came back to Seattle for about a week and then it was straight off to the other side of the world to Melbourne, Australia for the Aussie Millions with serbie for ten days. I just got back from that a week ago and am finally settling into a normal routine again which I haven’t had in what seems like ages now. I’ll probably write up a couple trip reports for those as a lot happened, but my hotel in Melbourne cost $27/day internet(excuse #3 for not blogging) and while they suckered me into it twice, I wasn’t about to pay for it every day just so I could give you all daily tourney updates like I do during the wsop.
2009 Results? 2010 goals? December 2009, January 2010 results? You wonder? I played a lot on both my laptop and desktop during these months due to traveling so I can’t really post a monthly graph or stats without either double posting from both databases or combining databases, neither of which I am prepared to do. December ended up being my 3rd losing month of 2009 with me losing around $29.5k. January I bounced back a bit and won something like $17k online, but lost about $3k playing live along with having another couple grand in travel expenses, accommodation, food, entertainment etc.
2009 was an okay year monetarily wise, I made more than most of my real life peers, but suspect I made much less than I lot of my poker peers. I’d rather not go into specific numbers for the year (yes, I pay my taxes btw I think I’ll owe something like 33 cents for every dollar I made in 2009) but I will say I ended up making <100k which is kinda meh for me. I played bigger than usual in December which I realize now may have been a mistake. I was reading in the wall street journal in December about how most traders tend to avoid placing risky or high volatility bets in December simply for the reason that they want to lock up their gains for the year and not destroy all their profit for the year in the last month of the year. While this is somewhat fish talk (lol locking up wins your poker career is all one big session, right?) I do see some merit to this and I may consider dropping down instead of shot taking next December for this very reason.
2010 goals. First I'd like to look back at my 2009 goals They were to
1. Not play any 10/20 until I make a post showing I have 100k online
2. Stick to my new schedule and focus on getting 25-30 hour tilt free poker playing in per week
3. Always maximize my hourly rate when playing. If this means 6 tabling 2/4 because that’s the best games running now so be it. If it means 2 tabling 5/10 so be it. The one exception I will add to this is learning a new game. So for example I’ve been playing some more PLO recently and obviously 1 or 2 tabling 1/2 HU PLO is not maximizing my hourly but hopefully this will improve my lifetime hourly rate as a poker player. This also means game selecting well, playing longer when winning, quitting if I am starting to tilt etc.
I’m pretty sure I failed miserably at #1. I’m a sucker for good games what can I say. I had some good sometimes month long spurts at #2 which would inevitably be interrupted by travel or visitors or staying up late one night and ruining it for the next three weeks. I’d really like to get better at keeping a schedule and sticking to it in 2010. If you want to make a lot of money at online poker, you really have to leatherass it up and grind 40 hours a week. I did okay at #3, though lately I’ve been playing some regulars in headsup 7 game and losing a bit to them overall which I’d like to stop. It’s really a waste of time and I’d be much better off grinding some lower 6max games. One thing I am proud of from 2009 is all the new games I learned. I think I paid a lot both in opportunity cost, and in “tuition” (losing a lot when first learning) but I think my newfound skills will really pay off for me in 2010 and beyond. I see a lot of the pure nlhe guys struggling these days and it’s nice to know I can table select a much wider range of games and limits than them and can usually find good games with fish instead of figuring out how to eek out that extra .02BB/1000 vs the 5/10 regs every day.
I’m still debating what I want my goals to be for 2010. Realistically if I wanted to make 1/4 a million I think I’d need to put in at least 500-600k hands or 40-50k hands per month. I’m not sure I’m prepared to do this so I have not committed to it yet, but it’s still weighing on my mind. The only goal I KNOW I have is I’d like to final table a wsop event. I plan on playing as many events as I can this summer and giving myself a real shot at a bracelet. That’s it for now, happy groundhog day everyone!
Add another $4k I lost playing some pretty good high stakes stud games for a total daily loss of $28k. Weee. Kinda frustrating that my biggest losing day is more than twice as big as my biggest loser now. Oh well. My time will come.
Here’s the big drop at the end. Pretty gut wrenching turn and river IMO. I think I played it standard but not totally sure. I could have taken a couple of different lines including just calling the 3 bet preflop but I think the money was getting in anyways. As played I’m a slight dog with 43% equity on the flop in case you are wondering.
On the bright side of things:
-I’m only down about $16k for the month which I think I MAY be able to push through, but it’s going to be hard esp cause I’ll drop down in limits for a few days now. In all likelihood I’ll be happy with a $8k loss or less for the month.
-I had a great time in New Jersey/Atlantic City/Philadelphia visiting my friend and wrote up a rough draft of my trip report. I’ll try to finish editing it and post it sometime in the next couple of days so be looking for that.
-I made some more progress getting some ATM leads today. You really have to be persistent at this and just go to as many places as possible before you find someone genuinely interested.
Be good and happy holidays!
I had to move up to where they respect my raises imo.
Yesterday I spent all day watching “Dr Razz’s”, “Razz made complex” eight video series on stoxpoker.com. It definitely opened my eyes to quite a few things and made me realize how poorly I was playing previously. Razz is a very difficult game to learn in my opinion because you can’t just pull up your equity on any given street, compare it to the pot odds, and make a decision that way. In fact that is a very poor way to learn the game and you will end up making loads of mistakes if you go about it that way. Dr Razz has compiled a series of graphs that are somewhat complicated to understand at first, but once you do they are immensely helpful in determining the correct play in any situation on any street.
If you are looking to learn razz, I suggest you start out by playing some low stakes for a couple 1000 hands and basically lose, but try to figure things out on your own at first. After you learn the trouble spots, rules, etc then I suggest you suck it up and watch the 7 hours of video he put up and do some analysis on your own afterwards. Your mind will be blown. My biggest mistake I found I was making was playing too loosely on 3rd and then folding too easily later in the hand (usually 4th or 5th) which is a pretty huge leak. I obviously have a ways to go before I consider myself anywhere close to an expert at this game, but for now, having watched all the videos I actually think I’m half decent.
That is the beauty of being able to play a lot of games and not just being a specialist in one. As you can see I was getting crushed at 10/20 razz, but there was a whale giving his money away at 100/200 razz today so I figured I was +EV in the lineup. While I may be leaking money to the other 100/200 razz regs there, I’m sure it was a profitable spot for me. At the same time, I got to play with other really good razz players and even learned a couple of things from them!
On Thursday I’ll be doing some traveling to the east coast to visit a college buddy of mine in Philadelphia. I’m super excited as I’m going to be going to Atlantic City for the first time. I’m not really sure what to expect, but people have said don’t expect Vegas, it’s gotta be better than 99% of all the other casinos I’ve been to though! I’ll be sure to report back. That’s all for now, if you find yourself getting bored at the tables this week go try some razzle dazzle! You might actually like it!
Like I said last post I ended up having a good month and cleared about $20k including a $4k stars bonus finally. I didn’t end up getting that many hours or hands in, but I did win some monies so that’s all that really matters, right? The thing I’m most proud of last month was that I was in the green for all three stud games (though it’s mostly due to just running good in the bigger games). I’m definitely improving, but obviously still have a ways to go, especially in my stud8 and razz games.
Laptop results were +$8600 over 1900 hands in HEM and +$1200 over 1000 stud hands. Lost a bit in donkaments.
Desktop HEM
Desktop Stud
Desktop HEM Graph
ATM
ATM machine wise I only made about $300 as opposed to $400 the previous months. This could be due to a number of thing such as natural variance, a shorter month, football season coming to an end and nobody want to see their 1-8 team play anymore, the weather getting colder and worse so not as many people not want to go out anymore. I’m not really sure. I just hope it doesn’t drop again in December. There’s not much more I can really do at this point except making sure the machines stay stocked at all times.
I have been working on acquiring some new spots recently. I’ve spoken to three prospective locations that sounded semi-interested which I’ve given my information to. I’m just waiting to hear back from upper management. I kind of forgot how difficult it is to actually speak to someone in charge at these places and convince them to work with me. Just gotta stay persistent and hope to get lucky again. Cross your fingers for me.
In case you haven’t heard it yet. Awkward Tiger Woods voicemail message to Jamie Grubbs.
Part one of my play was released yesterday. It’s hard to link directly, but if you go to Stoxpoker Videos and select coach “Eric Chipsahoya Rodawig” it is the “7 game mix: part 3″ video. This section is mostly Stud8 with a little Razz thrown in at $40/$80 and $100/$200 7 game on FTP. The pace is a bit on the slow side, but it’s very thorough and I definitely learned a few things. Part two should be out in late December early January.
Also, I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here yet, but I’m going to Melbourne, Australia for the Aussie Millions from Jan 14th-23rd with my boy Sarvesh/Serbie who I lived with this summer in Vegas. Drop me a line if you are going too and would like to hang out down under. Plane tickets were about $1700 roundtrip from Seattle and splitting a hotel ended up being about $100/person/night.
So I guess you’re probably wondering why I’ve been AWOL the past month and where the hell your monthly strategy post is. Well the truth is I actually wrote two strategy posts in November but decided not to publish them for now. I’ve done my best to monetize this site without completely selling out and paying someone else to write my entries for me obviously, but I’m making way less than $50/month at this and for the amount of effort I have to put in to those posts I think there are much better (and more profitable) ways to publish my content. So for now I’ve decided I’m going to write two articles a month and save them up for a book/e-book. So ya, be looking for that to come out in like 2013 when I finally get enough content, haha!
A whole lot has happened in the past month I’m not sure where to start. Pokerwise I ended up having a good month, I’ll post detailed results next post, but it started off really poorly with me digging an $8k hole or so and busting my stars account. Big thanks to Btimm for loaning me some stars money for a bit so I could grind out a $4k bonus there 8 tabling $1/$2 which coincidentally took quite a bit of the month. I started off 8 tabling NLH, but switched to PLO after a couple days after I realized how bad the NLH games have gotten even at the $1/$2 level. Here are my thoughts on both the games at the $1/$2 level.
$1/$2 NLH
The typical regular plays like the following: Relatively tight opening standards (but once they open they are not folding to a raise) and on a lot of tables. I’d say 22/18 or something and has a completely unpolarized 3 betting range. So instead of 3 betting JJ+,AQs and trash suited hands, they 3 bet 77+, KJo+. They love to flat 3 bets with pairs and set mine or peel a cbet on the flop. They love to flat 4 bets with 88 or KQ or even JTs from time to time. They also cbet too much.
To combat this I eventually adjusted by:
4-betting larger and for value – If they want to call my 4 bet with JTs or 99, fine, but it’s going to cost them 1/3 of their stack. No more 25-27bb 4 bets like I’d make at 5/10 or 10/20 where people usually shove or fold. Gotta get that extra 8bb where you can.
Betting bigger for value on the flop and turn – This is sort of an extension of the first adjustment because the $1/$2 regs love to call and peel on the early streets to try and hit their hand, but when the big bets come out on the river they are pretty passive and actually folded quite bit. So you need to punish them early in the hand for the maximum.
3-betting a wider range for value and less polarized – If they want to call my 3 bets with 33 100% of the time to try to spike a set, fine but that just means I don’t really want to be in there with the J7s as much as I’d like to have 88.
What this all adds up to is me putting in a lot money in the early streets of a hand. This does not play to my strengths as a poker player in my opinion. I used to say and think playing postflop and especially turns and rivers was where my edge came from but before I started playing a lot of PLO I’m not sure that was the case. Now I know for a fact I play better on those streets than the vast majority of players, but playing 100bb deep against $1/$2 regs I just don’t get a chance to use this skill very much and my edge diminishes drastically.
Another area where I believe I have a big edge is adjusting to my opponents. 90% of regs don’t adjust their game at all to who their playing and just play “their game” the vast majority of the time. Well I found that when I was 8 tabling I had a hard enough time keeping with all the action let alone adjusting to my opponents, so I found myself very much auto piloting and there goes another one of what I believe to be my edges out the window.
The reason I think PLO is such a great game is there isn’t much edge to be had preflop so it’s much harder to play a cookie cutter game given to you on a preflop hand chart by cbetting 90% and win. I think a great game would be ante hold’em where everyone antes, is dealt two cards, a flop is dealt and THEN the betting action begins. But such a game doesn’t exist so to PLO I go.
$1/$2 PLO
The typical $1/$2 PLO reg is extremely loose passive. He plays 40% of hands or more preflop and never folds anything postflop. I would strongly advise against bluffing, like ever. I can’t tell you how many times I would fire 3 barrels with nut blockers only to be called down by the 12th nuts. If you follow this advice you will do well. I could go into more specifics, but it really does just boil down to bet your good hands and check/fold or check down your weak hands.
Okay well enough poker strategy what else did I do this month? I made it out to Tulalip Casino about 30 mins outside of Seattle for the first time. I went with a couple of my non poker friends so we just gambled it up with some low stakes $10 Blackjack, Pai Gow and craps but I checked out their poker room and I’m not really interested in playing there anyways. Washington state law forbids you from betting more than $500 per hand link, so the highest NL stakes they had was $5/$10 which is basically cap NL with 50bb which I’m not really interested in playing and the highest limit game they had was $4/$8 which I’m definitely not playing unless there’s plenty of booze involved. Overall I ended up breaking even, but got a good two hours of gambling entertainment in. I was a bit disappointed that the drinks were still $5 a pop even when you’re gambling but I guess this is standard everywhere but Vegas from my experience.
I bought the New Super Mario Bros
I discovered a new, ultrasecret, completely natural way of increasing my stamina and attention span: yawning
This video got me thinking of all the different ways you could unlock a lock (voice activated, whistling, fingerprint, your iphone, possibilties are endless). Are keys sooo 20th century?
Completely mindblowing. We are in store for a bizarre 21st century IMO.
I was playing headsup to determine the winner of the first table in today’s $322 4x shootout FTOPS #13 today when the following hand occurred.
Full Tilt Poker Game #15928294408: FTOPS Event #13 (109222915), Table 114 – 60/120 – No Limit Hold’em – 15:09:43 ET – 2009/11/10
Seat 3: andr3w321 (4,654)
Seat 4: Slutaments (7,346)
Slutaments posts the small blind of 60
andr3w321 posts the big blind of 120
The button is in seat #4
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to andr3w321 [Ks Th]
Slutaments has reconnected
Slutaments raises to 360
andr3w321 calls 240
*** FLOP *** [4h 9d Jh]
andr3w321 checks
Slutaments has 15 seconds left to act
Slutaments bets 500
andr3w321 has 15 seconds left to act
andr3w321 calls 500
*** TURN *** [4h 9d Jh] [Js]
andr3w321 has 15 seconds left to act
andr3w321 has requested TIME
andr3w321 bets 1,050
Slutaments has 15 seconds left to act
Slutaments calls 1,050
*** RIVER *** [4h 9d Jh Js] [Qc]
andr3w321 has 15 seconds left to act
andr3w321 bets 2,744, and is all in
Slutaments has 15 seconds left to act
Slutaments has requested TIME
Slutaments calls 2,744
*** SHOW DOWN ***
andr3w321 shows [Ks Th] a straight, King high
Slutaments shows [Qd Qh] a full house, Queens full of Jacks
Slutaments wins the pot (9,308) with a full house, Queens full of Jacks
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 9,308 | Rake 0
Board: [4h 9d Jh Js Qc]
Seat 3: andr3w321 (big blind) showed [Ks Th] and lost with a straight, King high
Seat 4: Slutaments (small blind) showed [Qd Qh] and won (9,308) with a full house, Queens full of Jacks
Never been so badly slowrolled in my life. I’m sitting there all gitty I rivered a straight rooting for a call only to finally be shown the nut full house after a minute of him tanking. I have a newfound hatred for all Danish poker players. Check out Jeff Lisandro’s life story. Australian poker players are way cooler than Denmark’s.
Part 1
http://pokertube.com/Movies.aspx?movie=11777&title=Jeff_Lisandro_s_Life_Story_1_3&player=1
Part 2
http://pokertube.com/Movies.aspx?movie=11778&title=Jeff_Lisandro_s_Life_Story_2_3&player=1
Part 3
http://pokertube.com/Movies.aspx?movie=11779&title=Jeff_Lisandro_s_Life_Story_3_3&player=1
Yeah, I know a week late, so sue me. October ended up being a really good month for me winning about $17k. I was up $30k on the 29th or so, but that’s poker and I’m definitely not about to complain about my results for the month. I’ll post a graph and my desktop HEM results.
HEM desktop graph
HEM desktop stats
October ATMs, netted a little over $400 after expenses
I played a decent amount on my laptop and I can’t seem to get PT stud to collect all the hand histories correctly so the pictures are not the true results(which I have track by looking at BR #s from begin to end of month), but it’s the best I can do. I really wish HEM would hurry up and get stud and triple draw tracking as I really hate having inaccurate records. I think the main problem is HEM is taking the 8 game hand histories and moving them before PT stud can import them, but I’m not really sure how to fix it. I’m too dumb to figure it out, and I’d be more than willing to pay a premium for HEM stud tracking so if you’re listening HEM guys, hurry up so I can ship you your monies!
I logged on today to read the front page article on cardplayer.com saying how Ivey was the betting favorite to win the main event at 7/2 odds even though he only has 5% of the chips. I immediately thought this was insane and wanted to find out where I could put some money down laying 7/2 he would not win. First place I looked was Bodog.com and just wow. Consider this my PSA to the world to never place a bet at bodog.com and be very wary of placing bets with bookmakers that don’t offer both sides of a bet. They offer 7/2 odds all right, but you can only bet for Ivey to win. I ended up finding matchbook.com which I do recommend for your sports betting needs (for US customers that is, outside of US you may look into pinnaclesports.com). They currently offer 7/1 against and 6.2/1 for Ivey to win. In case you don’t realize how badly Bodog.com is raping their customers on their bet let me break this bet down for you mathematically.
Bodog is offering 7/2 odds Ivey will win. This means you can bet $100 to win $350. On matchbook.com you can bet $100 to win $620. Let’s suppose matchbook.com has the true line, this means Ivey will win 1/(1+(7+6.2)/2) or 1/7.6 times = 13.16% of the time. So bodog’s profit on each $100 bet is .1316*-250+(1-.1316)*100=$53.94 So your ROI on making this bet with bodog.com is -54%. Jesus Christ Bodog really!? I mean, I know you are a casino and just trying to make a profit, but this is why sports betting online should just be completely legalized in my opinion. Because if there were thousands of online sportsbooks available to the US consumer, like there are thousands of market makers in the US for the stock market (which is completely legalized gambling in my opinion) the few bookmakers with a virtual monopoly on the market wouldn’t be able to get away with such ridiculous price gouging.
PS Another way to calculate their profit on the bet is to assume they immediately hedge all bets for Ivey at 7/2 with matchbook’s 6.2/1 against. So if Ivey wins they pay out $250 and collect $520 for every $100 bet for a net profit of $270. If Ivey loses, they collect the $100 wagered. So their avg profit is .1316*270+(1-.1316)*100=$122.37 per $100 wagered. It’s kinda confusing that they can make more than is wagered, but basically if you win, they win even more than you do, and if you lose, they collect all the bets.
The first way calculates the bettor’s theoretical ROI, whereas the second calculates the book maker’s profit per $100 bet assuming they hedge elsewhere (which they don’t btw, they just offer really bad odds on all the runners in effect doing their own hedging and actually make WAY more than this per bet placed).
Anyways, after all my research I decided not to bet with the odds I could get. Laying Ivey at 14% odds chance to win is probably still a good bet in my opinion but just not good enough of a bet for me and I’m not really willing to risk the $1000 to win only $143 for what’s likely a 2-3% edge. With 5% of the chips in play he obviously has much better than a 5% chance to win because he’s
1) The best player in the world and
2) Definitely going for the win at all costs whereas some other players will probably be perfectly happy to move up the pay scale 2 or 3 people and then bust
I just kinda doubt these factors increase his chances of winning three times as much as the average player at the final table. Especially with all the coaching the final 9 will have received over the past couple of months.
Besides if I bet against him that means I can’t root for him to win! Go Phil!
This vid starts off kinda slow, but I PROMISE you it gets better!
After my September article was so hand history intensive I thought I’d make this month’s more qualitative in nature so what follows is my guide to shot taking or moving up.
1. Have a stop loss. This is by far the most important thing to come up with before you jump into a new game. When playing my normal game and limits I’m pretty good at not tilting. I know when I make mistakes and how to correct them. I know how much I’m likely to win or lose from session to session and when to quit when things aren’t going my way that day. However, when I play a new game I’m not used to the way hands play out or the bad beats or seeing myself make a lot of mistakes as a result of not knowing what the right play is. When I play a new, higher limit I am not used to the big swings and it’s only a matter of time of playing at that limit before I lose a larger amount of money than I am used to in a session. Both of these feelings are uncomfortable and at times can become very tilting. Over time as you gain more experience, your comfort level will increase and you will become much less prone to tilt as a result of these things.
In the mean time, playing tilted at a higher limit than you are used to is a sure fire way to lose a third (or more) of your bankroll in a single day and have to spend the next couple of months grinding it back. At a certain point you are going to tell yourself, “Oh what’s the difference I’m already down $x, what’s another $y, but if I get back to even I’ll be much happier!” This should set off alarm bells in your head that you are on tilt and you should quit immediately. Unfortunately, saying you are going to do something and actually doing it are two very different things. What I recommend is that you practice having losing sessions. Sound weird? No, I don’t mean purposely losing money obviously, I mean next time you sit down to play a session at your normal limits, set some sort of stoploss and make it your goal to quit when you reach it even if you are not on tilt. For example, set a stoploss of 1.5 or 2 buyins next time you play a session and quit immediately if you reach that mark. Do this a couple of times, and even if you only play a 10 minute session I think it will really help you next time you take a shot at a higher game from going off the deep end for a steep loss.
One quick thing to add is that in my normal games I don’t use a stoploss at all and don’t really see a need for one. I know myself well enough to know when I need a break and am not playing well and it’s quite obvious to me and easy for me to quit. However, when taking a shot at a bigger game I REALLY recommend using and implementing one as you will be out of your comfort zone and not know yourself as well and be much less able to gauge whether you are playing or A game or not.
2. Take a shot when there’s a fish in the game, not when you have $x bankroll. I’ve heard a number of very good players say this before, so I definitely don’t take credit for this but it’s definitely true. When people ask, “How many buyins should I have before moving up?” It’s really a bad question. You shouldn’t move up when you have $x amount of money, you should move up when you are going to make more money playing the bigger game than you would your normal game and aren’t at risk of going broke by doing so.
Take a look at the games you are trying to move up to. Are the people sitting at the table the exact same players at your normal slightly lower stakes? There’s a good chance they are. Do you have an edge on these players? Is there a big 90/10 fish in the game? I think if you spend a lot of time game selecting and only play when you have a big edge when shot taking you will actually find that the games are softer than your usual game. For example, if you usually just load up 6 random $1/$2 tables and play them without much regard for table selection, but when you play $2/$4 you always make sure there’s one big fish at the table that you have position on, you will find that the $2/$4 games are MUCH easier even if the 4 other regs at the table are twice as good.
3. Just because your shot went well does not mean you should never move back down. I read in an irockhoes post a couple weeks ago in response to the following:
Originally Posted by wtfbbqs
what do you guys do when shots go bad? not super bad, but i should have been up about 5k last night after about a 3hour session at 5/10. lost aa vs aq aipf for full stacks, qq vs ak aipf for full stacks, i only finished down 1.5k but its disheartening that if it wasn’t for run bads i would be on top of the world right now, i think im not going to play poker for a few days.
irockhoess Posted
You seem to be confused about the reason to take shots. Its not to make 5k and feel super. Its to slowly desensitize you to the higher stake while maintaining a cushion at your stake below so that in the long run you can get better by playing better competition and constantly be moving up.
It’s pretty good advice and I can’t really word it any better than him. I’ll just say that there should never be a moment where you say, okay I’m done with that level, never playing that again. I advise more of a fluid movement where you are playing a range of stakes. There are some days I’m just not feeling like playing my A game so I might play a stake or two lower than usual, or I just don’t feel like gambling and losing a huge sum of money to me that day. Then again, there are days I’m really feeling on and want to give myself a challenge, those days I play bigger. There’s also times where I spot a big fish and just load up whatever tables he’s on. Doesn’t matter what stakes. It’s all about finding the right stakes for you for that particular session to maximize your win and minimize your losses.
4. Most importantly, RUN GOOD!
——————————————————————————————–
Alright time for some more Ivey vids! Seriously how can you not be a fanboy? He’s not only widely accepted as the best poker player in pretty much all the games, the dude just knows how to live. I hear a lot of online players say, “Oh I’m just going to play for a couple more years. Then I’m done and I can really start to enjoy life with all the money I’ve made.” Well Ivey doesn’t have or need to play anymore but he does anyways for the love of the game(and money of course). But he genuinely enjoys what he’s doing in life and I don’t think he’d trade it for anything.
I bet you can’t stop watching this vid halfway through! It’s like trying to only eat one potato chip!