Please help, need advice (long)

[ QUOTE ]
I will say a few things that have been kind of brushed past in this thread, or said in the midst of insults and ignored. Please understand, Milenko, that I'm just trying to help you out a bit by saying what I'm saying - you may well be a very good poker player, but this advice is probably worthwhile.


1) You will not make $150/hr playing 6/12. You will not make $100/hr, or $50, or probably (based on the limited information you gave us) even $25/hr.

When we talk about winrates here, we talk in terms of BB/100 - or big bets per 100 hands. In other words, we talk about the number of big bets ($12 bets in your case) that we can win on average in 100 hands. In a B&M casino, you'll probably get 30-35 hands in each hour; for the sake of simplicity, we'll say it takes 3 hours to get 100 hands in. For you to make $450 in 3 hours, you'd have to make about 38 BB/100.

Sadly, this sort of winrate is impossible, and it isn't even close. A player who is crushing a .5/1 table online might make 4 BB/100. And as the limits go up, this number goes down. But if you could be a great 6/12 player and make 4 BB/100, you'd still only be making $48 every 100 hands - or $16 an hour.

You are looking at short term results and assuming they will generally hold up for you. This is a very dangerous assumption to be making.

2) One thing that needs to be understood is just how different the online games are to the ones in the casino you've played in. They are filled with much tougher players at similar limits, so much so that your 6/12 game is probably equivalent in difficulty to a 1/2 table on PartyPoker (and depending on what your 6/12 table is like, maybe even a .5/1 game). If you jumped into a 5/10 game online, you would likely be crushed by the players at that level.

3) Possibly the biggest red flag was your statement about having trouble with the very loose players at the lower limit games. Quite frankly, if these players are frustrating you, you're not ready to be playing against better competition. Our money is made off of players who are making mistakes, not ones who are playing correctly. The more mistakes the better, and nobody makes more mistakes than the super-loose fish that populate the 2/4 and 3/6 games in your local casino.


I hope you take all of this into consideration and decide that you're not ready to make poker a significant part of your income right now. If not, and you do decide to, best of luck.

[/ QUOTE ]

Thank you for explaining the big bets per 100 hands thing.

I am not "bragging" about my abilities, or saying that I think I am a poker "god" when I say that I truly was making $150 (roughly) per hour. I'm not saying that I've been playing a long time, but when I did win at 6/12 and 9/18, I typically won about $150 an hour. I'm not just talking one or two nights, or even one or two weeks doing this. If I am having a good night where people aren't catching miracle cards every hand, I make $150 an hour playing 6/12 and 9/18.

Let me give you an example of a night that I lost. I came to play 6/12, sat at a table, won some, lost some, won some, lost some, etc. So I decided to switch tables.

I sat down at the next available 6/12 table, which happened to have this guy with barely any teeth, a big smile, and a gigantic stack of chips. He had around $1,000 in nice little racks, stacked up in front of him.

The guy was playing EVERY single hand, raising pre-flop, raising and raising and raising. Amazingly, he ALWAYS won. If he put his chips on the table, they came back. Every time.

Either he was cheating, which I doubt in Commerce, as they are reputed to have the best security in the area, or he was on an insane luck streak. Either way, it was impossible for me to win.

When stuff like that happens, you bet your butt that I get a little upset. Sklansky's advice goes right down the drain in those situations. The idea that I would love to play this guy all day, every day is irrelevant when he continually catches miracle cards and wipes me out.

And that's all I see at the lower stakes. Not from the same person every time, of course. But when ten people see a flop, only two of which actually should be in the hand, at least one out of the other 8 is bound to hit their crappy cards.

It would be different if there were only a few maniacs at the table. I've witnessed that. Those are the tables I make the money at. I search for those tables. Me and the other good players simply take turns collecting the crappy players' chips. It's beautiful.

I'm not saying "you're wrong and I'm right." The truth is, I don't know anything more than what I've seen so far. Ever heard the expression "we are the sum of our experiences?" That's me. I have gone to a casino on several occasions with $300 (sometimes less), played 6/12 and 9/18 for about 6 or 7 hours, and come home with $900-1,000 in my pocket. Maybe that's deceptive, but it definitely happened on more than a few occasions.

And that is why I find it hard to understand what you are saying.

But I will definitely take what you have said into consideration, and will probably start out at the 0.5/1 games online until I have gained some experience.

I honestly appreciate everything you said. It may seem as if I am just complaining about a few certain things, but believe me, I read your post several times, and truly appreciate it in its entirety.