Long and heavy poker content - Page 2

Argus · #11 07-20-2005, 04:02 PM

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I am not too sure which forum to post this in.

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People complain about bad beat posts in any forum.
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1) After 200K hands at Party 1/2 and 1/2 6 max, I made as much in rakeback as I did from playing the game.

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If at first you don't succeed, try and try again.

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2) Following the starting hand charts in SSHE will not make you a TAG (eagle or money bag in PT). At best, you will have a 20-23% VP$IP. In order to get that down, you need to very carfully select the situations in which you play particular types of hands and you find the right conditions come along pretty infrequently.

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They come along all the time; you just have to recognise them. Don't play poker to fit a certain pokertracker autorating - play it to win. You will probably end up autorated as an eagle or moneybag, but that should not be your goal. Instead develop your understanding of preflop and postflop play. An example that I imagine is very common at 1/2:
Party 1/2 (10 Handed)
Preflop: Hero is CO with T[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] 8[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]
2 loose limpers to you, what's your action?

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3)A lot of the Advice in SSHE goes out the window as soon as your opponent has half a brain about odds and outs. This was a frequent critism of the book when it came out and I am moving into games where I find it to be true.

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I don't think you're ready for 30/60 yet.

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4) the onine poker landscape is changing. The games are getting tighter, players are getting smarter, pots are getting smaller and win rate is dropping. I think this trend is true no matter where you are or what level you play at.

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Tight and aggressive preflop is not enough.

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5) There is no 2+2er out there who has 900K in bankroll & 24 tables 30/60 and beats it for 9BB/100 hands.

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There are no unicorns either.

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6) There are dimensions of poker that are beyond simple mathematics. Even in limit, if you pick the right player you can raise him into folding when you have rags. If you choose the wrong player or he has the hand you are representing, this can be disasterous. Plus, you can't bluff all the time. If you get caught at it more than once, you're sunk. On the flip side, if people see you check raise to much they will be afraid to bet after you check and are likely to fold if you checkraise them if they do.

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So you're saying poker is hard because your oppenents don't fold when they have better hands? [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

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1) Reading players is hard to do over the internet (yes I played B&M before I played on line).

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No it isn't. Learn to analyze betting patterns instead of looking for shaking hands.

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2)The kind of attention needed to play on the required level cannot be successfully divided amoung four tables. You cannot play mechanically above the very lowest levels and expect to win very much.

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Quit projecting.

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I don't know what that reward may be as those who have been there or are there right now don't want to say or are too embarrassed to say.

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My reward has been that I'm much better at poker than I was before coming to this forum. I win money, but probably not enough over a long enough sample size to please you.

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The decision boils down to going back down in level to where I know I can make money, becoming a ten game rock or a 6 max specialist, switching to NL where I can make bets which give punishing odds to incorrect draws, becoming a MTT or SNG specialist, or hanging it up for a while until the next online boom (meantime expanding my reading beyond the dozen or so 2+2 books I have).

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We are all prisoners of our own minds. Free yourself of your limitations, tell yourself that poker is easy, and it will become moreso.

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I only want to hear from those who have enough experience to know. (see Homers postings about confidence intervals if you have questions whether or not you know).

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Right, but what do you want to hear from them?

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I will be more than willing to have discussions beyond the forum if you don't want to let certain things be publically known. This is not exactly stuff you can talk about with just anybody you know, you have to reach out into the wider world and that is what I am attempting here. Hopefully someone out there will read this and provide some good discussion and advice for the hundreds of us who read these boards and am at the same point I am.

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I have some good advice: read SSH, then think about it's lessons and how they apply to the situation that you are in.

Play only a single table, and pay close attention to every hand. Try to guess what villain showed down, then check the hand history to see if you were right. Remember how villain plays certain hands so you can make the right move. Learn - as you mentioned above - which villains are going to call you down with crap, and which will make judicious folds to your check/raise semi-bluffs.

Get a coach. If you want to improve, it will help.

Don't be Phil Hellmuth and think you deserve to win. You will take and give bad beats. You might be a genius and wildly successful outside poker, but it's still hard and you still have to work hard to win in the long term. On any given day you could still swing very far in either direction.

Exsubmariner · #12 07-20-2005, 04:09 PM

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If I had to make an educated guess, it seems like you're a mediocre to good limit hold 'em player. There is a lot more to squeeze out of this game, and you simply cannot do it playing 200k hands of 1/2 micro-limit poker. 2/4 and 3/6 confront you with more thinking situations where you'll begin to hone the expert plays that comprise your extra profit at the higher levels and separate the good players from the great and expert ones.

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I humbly submit I think you are right on the money here. I have considered dropping down to one table at a time and concentrating on beating individual players in the game. I may eventually get to where I can do it four games at a time, but right now I think that is a tall order and it's affecting my play in that I miss opportunities. Would you recommend one tabling it for a while?

Exsubmariner · #13 07-20-2005, 04:16 PM

I'm adding this to my favorite threads and I'm going to come back and reread it every time I get frustrated at the 2/4 tables. I appreciate the link.

meep_42 · #14 07-20-2005, 04:23 PM

Don't worry, I doubt I have (m)any non-ho-hum posts.

I say that the "standard" 17-19 VPIP isn't optimal because i've been successful above that and don't think the situations i've put myself in doing it are right on the razor's edge of neutral EV. It's just my gut feeling and experience.

-d

sy_or_bust · #15 07-20-2005, 04:31 PM

Just wanted to add my support for the 20-22 VP$IP camp.

Harv72b · #16 07-20-2005, 05:21 PM

I haven't read any of the other replies, so forgive me if I cover the same ground that's been done to death.

First of all, it is in pretty poor taste to PM someone with unsolicited questions, particularly if it isn't someone that you've grown to know over time here & at the tables. You are best off doing exactly what you did here, and posting your questions on the forum; as long as you're respectful about it (and don't just cover the same questions that can be found 20 more times in the first 3 pages), you'll generally get good answers. Just for future reference. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

On to your specific points:

1) This is not at all unusual among regular players, particularly those without a whole lot of experience. Not that 200k hands isn't experienced, but you know what I mean. The 1/2 level at Party can be pretty swingy, as you'll see a relative influx of pretty good players at this level every time there's a decent bonus offer (1/2 is the level of choice for most bonus chasers), and of course any 6max or other shorthanded game can produce a lot of variance. Don't get discouraged--you are winning money over a pretty good sized sample. You see a lot of people on here claiming win rates in excess of 3BB/hour, some of whom actually are doing that over more than a few weeks, but understand that is the exception, and not the rule.

2) SSH was written with the B&M game in mind, which is generally much looser than your typical internet SS table. Because of that, you do have to stray a bit from the starting hand tables, even the ones written for "tight" games. This is one of those things that just comes with experience; the fact that you recognize that you should be doing this indicates that you've gotten over that hump already, for the most part. There's a lot more to it than just generic table conditions, too--you have to recognize that you just don't want to get involved in a pot vs. some players with anything less than a true premium hand (unless the pot odds indicate otherwise; I mean HU or 3-handed), whereas there are other players that you should be 3-betting to isolate on with hands that SSH tells you to fold for even 1 bet.

3) This is where table selection & varying your postflop play factor into it. You should obviously be seeking out games against the worst opponents possible--use your buddy list! But no matter how selective you are, you will rarely find yourself on a table without at least one or two other good players, and these good players will recognize your betting patterns if you're just playing by the book every single hand. There are times when you have to take a line that might not be the most +EV, in order to set up better profits later. Just remember that you should only be doing this against good, thinking opponents, and irregardless of PT stats, those opponents are quite rare in SS Party games.

4) The tables are a tad tighter than last year around this time, I guess (I don't have empirical evidence to support or disprove this), but they are far from "tight". I blame this on a combination of the literal mountains of information available to the rank amateur on poker strategy, and also on the fact that last year's batch of WSOP wannabes have now either improved their games or gone broke, for the most part. With ESPN's telecasts of WSOP 2005 just now starting, I think we'll see another influx of poor players in the near future, especially when the ME gets going on tv (and people see Dannenmen finish 2nd). As far as the 6max tables on Party, Party gets more rake when more hands/hour are played. The amount of action is secondary to the number of hands. Happily, good players also earn more/hr when they get to play more hands, so the 6max tables are good for everyone (except the guys losing money there).

5) Not sure about your first statement, your second is probably true, and your third certainly true. This is all neither here nor there.

6) There are dimensions beyond what you even mentioned, such as what your opponent thinks you think he thinks you have. Yes, bluffing is a part of the limit game, particularly if you're playing 6max, but it isn't a big part of it. I'm sure you've noticed that your typical 1/2 player just doesn't fold very much, and if you're bluffing into them you're just spewing chips (this includes semibluffing, btw). Again, the stone bluff in limit poker should be reserved for either the good, thinking opponent, or the incredibly weak/tight one, and again, both are very rare at these limits. Note that I do not mean you shouldn't be betting AK UI vs. 3 opponents on the flop--this is not a stone bluff, as there is a fair chance that you actually do hold the best hand and a good chance that you will improve to do so. But if it's checked around 4-handed on an A83 rainbow flop and you're holding J9s, there's no point in even trying a bet when an offsuit Q shows on the turn.

It is not all that difficult to read most opponents (maniacs & LAGs, to a lesser extent TAGs can be difficult at times) over the internet. Just understand that you are not so much reading their holding on a particular hand (although this is possible), but rather the patterns that they show you over a large number of hands. Once you know their tendencies, it becomes relatively easy to beat them postflop.

I think there are a few (very few) players who can play at this level on 4 or possibly even 6 tables, but the vast majority cannot & never will be able to. I count myself squarely in the latter category, which is why I rarely play more than 2 tables at once. However, you most assuredly can play mechanical ABC poker at pretty high levels and still turn a good win rate--your BB/100 hands will not be as high as if you were playing 1 or 2 tables, but your BB/hr will be higher. It's all about table selection & your own skill, particularly in the postflop game. And believe me, there are plenty of terrible players on 15/30 & beyond.

I'm not broke either. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] I almost did it about 3 months into my poker "career", but down to less than 25 BBs for the 3/6 game I was playing at the time (stupid, I now know), I rebounded. If you are playing good poker and not rushing your way up the limits before you are properly bankrolled (and experienced), you aren't going to go broke. Most poker players eventually do go broke because they either do jump into a "juicy" game that's way above their bankroll & get slammed, or they cannot accept failure and move back down if they're losing at a new limit. Be smart about your bankroll and you don't have to worry.

What is true of every poker player, and I say this with complete confidence, is that at some point they go through exactly what you're describing now. It happened to me, and I'm sure it's happend to everyone from Amarillo Slim & Doyle Brunson down Greg Raymer & Gus Hansen. We all get to that point where we realize that this game isn't as easy as it once seemed, and that maybe we aren't some kind of prodigy like we thought when we were winning at 6 BB/100 hands over the first 6 months we played. For many people, I'm sure, this represents the beginning of the end of their poker careers. After all, part of the reason that we sit through the long hours at the table & the multitude of bad beats is that when it boils down to it, we enjoy the game. If the enjoyment goes away, then for many people, whatever monetary rewards they're reaping from poker are no longer worth it.

My advice? Don't take a break, because I'm sure you've already tried that to some extent or another. Don't go out & read a bazillion more books. Don't quit. And don't specialize completely in one discipline of the game.

Vary your play more. Play some SnGs & MTTs for the variety, sit down at a few NL tables with cheap buy-ins, and let yourself play some microlimit Omaha or Stud just for the fun of it. The .50/1 2+2 tables that spring up regularly are a great way to take a break from serious play & just have fun. You've been winning, albeit not as much as you'd like to, at LHE for a good amount of time now, and that's not likely to change as long as you keep doing what you've been doing. So if LHE has stopped being fun for you, then find another game that is still fun & use that as a "break" from the grind.

Whatever you do, good luck to you. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Harv72b · #17 07-20-2005, 05:29 PM

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Don't worry, I doubt I have (m)any non-ho-hum posts.

I say that the "standard" 17-19 VPIP isn't optimal because i've been successful above that and don't think the situations i've put myself in doing it are right on the razor's edge of neutral EV. It's just my gut feeling and experience.

-d

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I don't have that many hands on you in my new database (stoopid windows), but FWIW, I think you play a little tight for the 6max game. I like to maintain a VPIP between 25 & 30 for those tables, depending on the skill of my opponents. I do alright short-handed. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

Lost Wages · #18 07-20-2005, 05:50 PM

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Betting marginal hands for value, for example, is rarely going to be used in higher limits

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Actually, the opposite is true. At low limits you can win simply by playing tight/aggressive/straight forward and letting your poor playing opponents blunder away their chips. At higher limits, there are relatively less poor opponents and you have to look elsewhere. Thin value betting is one of the skills that seperates experts from also ran's.

Lost Wages

crunchy1 · #19 07-20-2005, 05:52 PM

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Just wanted to add my support for the 20-22 VP$IP camp.

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meep_42 · #20 07-20-2005, 05:53 PM

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Don't worry, I doubt I have (m)any non-ho-hum posts.

I say that the "standard" 17-19 VPIP isn't optimal because i've been successful above that and don't think the situations i've put myself in doing it are right on the razor's edge of neutral EV. It's just my gut feeling and experience.

-d

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I don't have that many hands on you in my new database (stoopid windows), but FWIW, I think you play a little tight for the 6max game. I like to maintain a VPIP between 25 & 30 for those tables, depending on the skill of my opponents. I do alright short-handed. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

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I'm right at about 25-26 right now, and i'm comfortable with that. As I get more comfortable with shorthanded play, i'll likely creep up to 28-29.

-d