[Harv72b]

[ QUOTE ]
What's my biggest, hardest adaptation?

[/ QUOTE ]

I think for most NL players making the switch, it's getting used to drawing hands, value betting, and paying off.

In NL, it's relatively easy to protect your made hands by making a large bet or raise, as you know. The same is not true in LHE; from your point of view, there are going to be times when you are completely justified in continuing with a weak draw or middle/bottom pair where you would instamuck it in a NL game. From your opponents' point of view, this means that they are sometimes correct to call your bets with these same weak draws, which can in turn lead to a lot of frustrating "suckouts". Small Stakes Hold'em by Miller, Malmuth, and Sklansky addresses these aspects of the game in detail, and is well worth a read if you haven't done so already.

In NL, you're probably used to checking through the river when holding a strong but vulnerable hand. For example, you've bet every street with QQ vs. 1 opponent, and then an ace comes on the river. Or you have AA on a rags board but the river puts 4 to a straight on board. In LHE, you don't have to worry so much about being trapped--the worst that could possibly happen in a HU situation on the river is that you lose 2 big bets after betting & calling a raise. This makes it correct to value bet the river (or other streets) with a fairly wide range of holdings, depending on your opponent(s). By the same token, since you cannot expect to win a huge amount of money by trapping your opponents, it is rarely correct to slowplay in LHE, and almost never correct to slowplay the flop and the turn. And since your implied odds are necessarily much lower, you have to be much more choosy about which hands you play preflop, especially against a raise.

There will also be times where a scare card hits and your opponent bets into you or raises. Again, in NL it's often necessary to fold to this aggression, but in LHE you cannot be stacked by your opponent. Thus, you should be calling down much more often than you're used to in NL--you should actually only be winning about 52-54% of your showdowns in small/micro-stakes limit. This percentage marks the happy medium between being a loose/passive ATM and a weak/tight "fit or fold" type of player. A good example might be if you are holding TPTK against an aggressive opponent who check/calls you to the river. If an obvious draw completes on the river and he suddenly bets into you, this should not be an automatic fold for you; in fact, against an aggressive opponent, this is usually an automatic call.

Post lots of hands here as you're getting used to these changes & are unsure about whether or not you made the right play.

[ QUOTE ]
What kind of bankroll do I need?

[/ QUOTE ]

The accepted standard is 300 big bets for the limit you are playing. With a $3000 bankroll, you could play 5/10.

[ QUOTE ]
What levels should I start at?

[/ QUOTE ]

Even though you're bankrolled for 5/10, you should probably start lower than that. If you can stand the tedium of playing for fairly meaningless amounts of money, I would even go so far as to recommend putting in a few thousand hands of .50/1 just to get the feel of the game. At any rate, I would not advise you to start out any higher than 2/4; the 3/6 game is probably the biggest jump in difficulty that you'll see in LHE, at least until you get into high stakes games. The high aggression level typical in 3/6 & above games will only make it more difficult for you to adjust to limit.

[ QUOTE ]
To those experienced; what advice would you have given yourself when you started playing? What did you have to learn the hard way? To those newer, What are you struggling with now?

[/ QUOTE ]

I started out in limit, and haven't put a whole lot of time into NL cash games. Because of that, I can't really empathize with your situation; the advice I gave above is just based on my own observations from my limited NL experience, and on what I've read others say here. The best advice I could possibly give (or hope to have gotten when I started out) would be to buy & read SSH, mentioned above. I stumbled onto the book by accident myself about 2 months after I started playing, and it has improved my game exponentially since. The rest of the advice is standard for poker (don't play above your bankroll, etc.), and I'm sure you already know it.

Good luck in your changeover! [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]