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What is the decent new player's most frequent leaks?
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Off the top of my head....
1. Choosing tables as though it were a B&M casino. You don't have to go on the list and take the first possible table -- take advantage of your power. Look around, check out four, or five, or eleven tables and see which one(s) are juicy (read: high VPIP). Sit at the good ones, close the bad ones. On a related note, when your table turns sour because the fish swam away and the sharks have settled in, stop posting blinds and move on.
2. No adjusting to the "hit-to-win" style that soft low-limit tables require. Pure bluffs won't get you too far against most players at these tables; you've got to have SOMETHING. That doesn't mean you need three of a kind or better to win; it just means that you can't expect to buy many blinds with balls alone.
3. Chasing. Every day, when I sit down at the tables, I remind myself "chasing is losing." Obviously there are times when you're getting pot odds to call, but people at the low-limit tables have a tendency to think "all I need is an ace and I win this pot," and use that to justify calling all the way down. Check your outs, check your pot odds, and fold when appropriate.
4. Keeping players honest. The best way to keep a player honest is to bust his ass when you've got him dead. When you've got JJ on the button and the UTG limper/caller bets out at the AKQ flop and gets two overcalls, let it go. You can swear at the monitor -- heck, it's encouraged -- but just let it go. So often we feel that we're entitled to win with good hands; the sooner we learn to fold our A [img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img] A [img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img] to a single bet when there are three spades on the flop, the healthier our bankroll will be.
5. Slow playing too often. Many books address this, but at low-limit games it's especially important. Five see a flop where you've got AK. The board reads A-9-7: that's top pair, top kicker! Better yet, the mouth-breathing imbecile on your right just bet it. Time to check and get all those sweet, sweet chasers. WRONG. Raise it up to drive out the fishermen with their 98, T7, KT, etc. You don't want people to see the card that kills you. If you win it right here, don't be dismayed -- a guaranteed 5.5 BBs beats the heck out of a 25% chance at the 18ish BBs you get when you check all the way down. Just think how sick you feel when the turn comes a T, 8, or 6 and some fish wakes up. You don't want that to happen.
6. Not paying attention. Do you have a TV on while you play? A radio? A book open? A website (or two, or three) running in the background? Do you occasionally have a lil' ol' drink or two? These distractions make it much harder to give the game the concentration it needs so that you can play your best. I suggest you single-table until you start feeling really comfortable, then gradually introduce other tables when you can handle them without killing your (new and improved) win rate.
7. Finally, as previously mentioned, get
Poker Tracker . I put it last because, having played heavily for four months, I assume you already have it. If I knew for a fact you didn't have PT yet, I'd make that #1, 2, and 3 on my list. Maybe #4, too. Once you've got PT up and running, make sure that you adjust your play based on the reads -- you can bluff tighties more often, you can fold fish raises more often, you can loosen up against calling stations, you can fold to TP-P pre-flop raises, you can re-raise maniacs to go heads-up with good (but not stellar) hands. You'll get a better idea of when a blind attack will work, when a blind defense is called for, when a raise means "GET OUT," when a river bet can take down the pot, and so forth. It's a bargain at ten times its price.
I hope these hints aren't too low-level for you, but you didn't give us much to go on, so I went with the most obvious mistakes that novices make.