Defeated by 1/2 - whining etc

[Wario]

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What are your .5/1 stats like?

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I posted them here . I only played 10k hands but my winrate was 5.02BB/100.

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There's your problem, the 1/2 game is terrible during the day.

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I live in the UK which is 5 hours ahead of EST, this makes it difficult to play at the best times. I occasionaly play 6-8pm EST when the tables seem better but that's the latest I play.

I think I'm going to try 1/2 6-max for 10k hands, if I can beat that then I'll come back to full.

Thanks for all the responses, really appreciate it. [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]

[afreeman]

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Where should I go now? I want to find out what I'm doing wrong but am not sure where to start looking. I post most of the hands I have trouble with but I am probably misplaying loads of hands that I don't realise.

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My advice is a lot less fun then that of other posters here, but I think you should spend a couple days going back over your hand database. Start by re-skimming SSH and friends and then look at each hand you played out to the river. Along the way, you'll often find yourself saying "WTF was I thinking here?!?". But, you'll also see yourself making some of the really obvious and common errors less often as you get deeper into the hand histories. This will: (1) increase your confidence, and (2) help clarify what you may be doing wrong in specific situations.

You'll also come up with a number of hands with really close calls where the correct decision is not immediately clear, even after study and consideration; that is, they are borderline decisions that could go either way. Print these hands out and put them off to the side somewhere. When you're done sifting, go back and count up all the times you won money and the times you lost money in these uncertain situations. These two numbers should be pretty close (e.g. 50%/50% of each). By definition, if these decisions are actually borderline, then you should be about breaking even on the results of them. If you are not, then you probably need to tune more fundamental aspects of your game such as overall aggression level, pre-flop standards, etc.

[morberg]

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I live in the UK which is 5 hours ahead of EST, this makes it difficult to play at the best times. I occasionaly play 6-8pm EST when the tables seem better but that's the latest I play.


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Consider trying a site with more european players; perhaps your time slot will fit better in with the mating season of the mediterranean and north sea fish.

[buffett]

4 questions:
How long have you been playing?
Which books have you read?
Are your 1/2 stats (vpip etc) the same as your 50/1 stats?
Do you keep track of your opponents' stats and slightly adjust your play based on whether you're heads up against a rock versus a maniac?
-web

[bergh]

The steam roller betting that works so well at .5/1 doesn't work that well at 1/2. You are going to be trapped to often.

I have suffered a deep downsing at 1/2 and I'm recently starting to recover after cutting down on aggression (it might be luck though...). Try to take advantage of other aggressive players. If you occationally check-raise the turn with good cards instead of just betting on, you will be harder to read and it will be harder to trap your marginal hands.

Playing a lot at 6 max tables will improve your heads up skill, wich starts to become more important when the game gets tighter...

[tiltaholic]

wario-
don't despair. you can beat 1/2. imho, from your posts and written reasoning, I think you are pushing hard (being aggressive) in situations where your edge is thin. this is not bad per se, however i can easily see it causing a large downswings (and downswings are always materialize faster than upswings, at least in my experience). perhaps you have a similar problem to me: when i lose, i lose big, but when i win, i win moderate (or give back some of my "upswing" with loose poor play).
-t

[Wario]

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My advice is a lot less fun then that of other posters here, but I think you should spend a couple days going back over your hand database. Start by re-skimming SSH and friends and then look at each hand you played out to the river. Along the way, you'll often find yourself saying "WTF was I thinking here?!?". But, you'll also see yourself making some of the really obvious and common errors less often as you get deeper into the hand histories. This will: (1) increase your confidence, and (2) help clarify what you may be doing wrong in specific situations.

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Good plan, I'll try that. Is there any way to filter out hands in PT that didn't see the flop?


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How long have you been playing?
Which books have you read?
Are your 1/2 stats (vpip etc) the same as your 50/1 stats?
Do you keep track of your opponents' stats and slightly adjust your play based on whether you're heads up against a rock versus a maniac?

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I started playing about 4 months ago. The only major difference is that I'm tighter postflop at 1/2, I think I might be too tight.

I use gametime and base some decisions on my opponent's stats but I don't datamine so I have limited sample sizes. This means I can't take advantage of many postflop stats.

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wario-
don't despair. you can beat 1/2. imho, from your posts and written reasoning, I think you are pushing hard (being aggressive) in situations where your edge is thin. this is not bad per se, however i can easily see it causing a large downswings (and downswings are always materialize faster than upswings, at least in my experience). perhaps you have a similar problem to me: when i lose, i lose big, but when i win, i win moderate (or give back some of my "upswing" with loose poor play).

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Thanks tilt, although PT says my SD is only 14.5BB/100 which is why I'm starting to believe it's not varience.

If 17k hands isn't enough to determine I'm a loser/breakeven , how many is? 20k? 25?

[randomfish]

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If 17k hands isn't enough to determine I'm a loser/breakeven , how many is? 20k? 25?

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After 17k hands, with an winrate of (0.3) BB/100 and a standard deviation of 14.5 BB/100, your 95% confidence interval for your winrate is (2.48) to 1.88; that is, your true win rate is somewhere within this range with 95% probability*.

Your SE = 14.5/sqrt(170), or somwhere around 1.11, for about 39% probability that you are, in fact, at least a breakeven player at this level.

Don't despair yet, swings are rough in fixed limit.

* I don't think that's exactly correct in a mathematical sense, but I can't remember the true definition [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Nick Royale]

Haven't read all the posts in this thread so maybe some one has already pointed out that table selection is very important at 1-2 full. Do you use GameTime+? I often find myself at tight tables losing some money before I find a couple of good ones and win it all back.

Other than that I would have guessed you're a 2-3 BB/100 winning player by judging from your posts (have read quite a lot of them). It seems to me you're not making any major mistakes, but as you say there can be big leaks you haven't discovered yet. Keep checking your PT database for overall losing hands and post hands you don't know you played right and we will help you in finding those leaks.

That said 17k hands isn't enough of a sample size to say you're uncapable of beating the game. This is a very intressting thread by Bison: Variance and sample sizes, in real terms

[Nick Royale]

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After 17k hands, with an winrate of (0.3) BB/100 and a standard deviation of 14.5 BB/100, your 95% confidence interval for your winrate is (2.48) to 1.88; that is, your true win rate is somewhere within this range with 95% probability*.

Your SE = 14.5/sqrt(170), or somwhere around 1.11, for about 39% probability that you are, in fact, at least a breakeven player at this level.

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This is intressting. Where did you get all these numbers from? (2.48 1.88 170 etc.)