Do any other winning players...

[elbuddha]

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One, who are you comparing yourself to?

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Probably some of the posts along the lines of "I started two months ago with $200 and now I only have $2000 because I'm in the middle of a 50BB downswing here's my 5k-hand stats whats wrong?"

[martinimagic]

I have been playing poker for 7 months and I feel like a below average player. I just recently made it to 0.7/100 BB so I am now a winning player of some sort. The ups and downs can really beat on your self esteem and confidence. I think what you are feeling is very common... my personal opinion is this feeling seperates you from the LPP's and LAP's. Knowing you don't know puts you way ahead of most people.

[Aaron W.]

I'm pretty comfortable when I sit down to play. I don't like every decision I make, and I catch a lot of errors two seconds too late, but I'm also a 16 VPIP preflop which means I'm in fewer marginal places. (My mentality has changed towards playing more loosely in the last few months, but it takes a while for my stats to catch up.)

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i was just wondering if anyone else is/was in the same situation and what you're doing/did to strenghten your play.

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I would guess that the biggest problem is that players don't know how to adjust to changing game situations. And they can't make adjustments because they haven't been paying enough attention to what's going on with the other players. The need for constant action by multi-tabling means that players miss many cues which tell them they need to adjust and how.

This is basically saying that micro players don't think enough.

Level 1 thinking: I have... so I should...
Level 2 thinking: I have... this player tends to... so I should...
Level 3 thinking: I have... this player tends to... so he probably has (a specific range of hands)... so I should...

These levels are arbitrarily named, and maybe aren't in the correct order, but this is how I see it. I'm at 2 moving towards 3, which means I'm trying to improve hand-reading skills.

[Entity]

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My mentality has changed towards playing more loosely in the last few months, but it takes a while for my stats to catch up.

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This means you're trying to loosen up, right? Because you should be.

[bigmac366]

hey tilt, i'm begining to see what your saying about the party 2/4 game. awful players, should be a gold mine, but its not workin out so far. after a huge sample size (4K) i'm beating the game for an astonishing .22bb's/100. thats including some pretty large swings. thursday, up 75b's, friday down 80bb's, today up 50bb's so far [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]. so far its been alot of risk and little reward. i know there are some adjustments i need to make, i just havent figured them all out yet. so far i think all of my significant profit has come from maniacs, because the fish keep rivering me. i'll keep ya posted if i figure anything significant out.

[bigmac366]

i agree whole heartidly with both your posts.

[iluzion]

AA is almost 50% of my total profits, is THAT bad? I would be BARELY in the red if it were not for AA down to TT.

[John Paul]

Sometimes I feel bad as well, and i just moved up to 1/2 after a really good run at .5/1 (6bb/100 over 12k despite a 160 BB downswing).

One thought- you might want to stop with the table selection, at least if you are still playing .5/1. I found that single tabling without table selection may me learn to read players and improved my game a great deal.

[Aaron W.]

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My mentality has changed towards playing more loosely in the last few months, but it takes a while for my stats to catch up.

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This means you're trying to loosen up, right? Because you should be.

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Absolutely. I was shocked to discover the following stat:

BB/hand = .02 for all hands
BB/hand = .43 for VPIP hands

Blinds account for roughly .75 BB/9 hands = .08 BB/hand, which accounts for some of the discrepancy (money I lose from all hands, but not VPIP hands), but not nearly enough. Basically, I think this means I'm playing the highly profitable hands well, but I'm also passing up on far too many (less) profitable situations. Losing BB/hand for VPIP is fine if it brings up BB/hand for all hands.

The ASF of games I play in is 38%, with # players = 9.2, so I usually see games with 3.5 people in the pot. It's a bit tighter than lots of the other micros games, which means I should be coming in for a raise more often (PFR = 7.9), and really be watching postflop tendencies to take advantage of tight-passive players (give up sooner), weak or loose river players (push harder), etc.

I should really spend more time reading the small stakes forum, but time is limited right now. Maybe when summer rolls around I can make the time to step up a little.

[TripleH68]

Most days I might take mediocre to be a compliment.

Of all the poker books I have read this line keeps ringing in my head...

"Perfect play on the first two cards will enable you to only break even at best if you are not adept at later rounds." -S&M.