A break helps..

When I started playing poker, I stuck to only tourneys – started at the micro-stake STTs, moved on to low-stakes STTs and MTTs, and have done reasonably well so far. But the attraction of making big money consistently from cash games always remained. Around early Dec, I started playing 10NL full-ring on FTP and Stars, was doing decently and by about mid-Jan moved to 25NL full ring even though I wasn’t really bankrolled for it – I had a pretty small bankroll, but I only had about 15-20 hours every week for poker, and didn’t want to grind it out forever at 10NL. I did okay in Jan and Feb, making about 6-7 big bets per 100 hands(obviously, the sample size is pretty small – less than 10K hands in total).

As you can see, nothing spectacular, but fairly steady. The stats for December and January were similar.


Then came March.

Then came March. A few suckouts early in the Month, and I was on monkey-tilt pretty much through the first two weeks. Towards mid-March, I just gave up, gave poker a break, and went back to my books. Got HOCG (Harrington on Cash games) and went through Professional No Limit Hold’em again. The 2nd volume of HOCG is pure gold, got some good tips on how to play weak cash games (Foxwoods!), how to play against LAGs, and also how to play deep-stacked. I guess the book really helped drive home some concepts that I had been reading about and thinking about for a while, but didn’t really know how to apply.

Fast forward to April -

I switched over to 6-max tables, and also to the 30NL “Deep” tables on FTP. I used to play at about a 21/11 on full ring, I am now playing 41/15 on the 6-max 30NL Deep tables and on the 25NL 6-max tables, and I am feeling so much more comfortable and in control. My hand reading seems to have improved considerably, and boy, do I get paid off when I hit!

The break helped in more ways than one – it obviously helped me get over the tilt, helped me stop worrying about the bad month, helped me figure out that I should try different things – play deepstacked tables where post-flop play is the nuts, play 6-max tables where aggression is the nuts, and just play a different style altogether. Obviously, its way too early to say if this is going to be a sustainable strategy, need a lot more hands at this level to figure out what I need to work on.

Will post specific hand histories, bankroll details and targets, this was just the first post to get the blog started.