Re: I come out a winner, but a small one... help?
You can't read very much into individual hand stats after only 13k hands. You especially shouldn't try to read into the win rates with individual hands this soon--all it takes is a couple of a monster bad beats (or overplayed hands) to swing your win rate by a huge margin.
My own sample size is too small (~44k hands over many levels), but FWIW, AJs is 5th on my list in terms of winning percentage and BB/hands (it should be lower, but not a whole lot lower--AJs is a very good hand, if played properly). JTs & KTs are also winners for me thus far, while A3s is a slight loser. 98s I haven't done well, but I remind myself that these are all of my Party hands, going back to my first few sessions at .50/1.
Pokey's post is excellent advice, but I would like to add one more item to his list: playing mediocre hands out of position. This is likely to be one of the major reasons your suited connectors are overall losers--you're limping with them too early in the order, or else with too few limpers ahead of you. Suited connectors like a large pot, preferably 5-handed or more, and they absolutely hate a raised pot. The same goes for AXs.
Some other numbers you should take notice of are:
-Went to Showdown. This should be somewhere in the low- to mid-thirties. Much lower means that you're folding too often, costing yourself some pots. Much higher means that you're paying off too much when the betting patterns should make it fairly obvious that you're beaten. Both of these can be major leaks.
-PFR was mentioned, but I want to stress it. Especially on the loose microlimits games, you should be raising your premium hands to get more bets out of the "any two will do" crowd. If your PFR is below 8, you aren't raising often enough (it should be even higher than that as you move up in limits, and the tables get tighter).
Keep one thing in mind, however--you're winning money overall. That fact alone makes you better than the majority of poker players, even if your win rate isn't as high as some of the ones you see posted on here. You're also asking the right questions on the right forums, and doing the right thing by reading good poker books. Keep heading down that path and your game can only get better.
|