Interesting start
Jan. 3rd, 2011 01:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksA curious start to the New Year. I put some focus into actually winning some cash at the tables on stars, so stuck to six tables. Result. Win. On FTP I had a bit of a stinker yesterday, but all within the standard scheme of things. Result. Small loss. And so this evening I put in some "training" at the low stakes 25c-50c 6-Max on Party. Result after an hour - down nearly six buy-ins. Once again my mistake was in believing what I read on 2+2, rather than following my own gut instincts. How many times will I ignore my long-learnt dictum that 90%+ of all poker advice is shit?
Still, $300 isn't much in the grand scheme of things, and I expected to lose money while learning opponents' general ranges. Well, I certainly did that tonight. As a general rule, it's just like full ring for most players. If the money goes in, then they have the hand. All these ideas that players are pushing thin value are, at this level, not particularly true. Well, they aren't true at all. It's just like playing the reg-tags on Stars. I would have done far better just to play my normal Full Ring game, ignoring the first three positions.
Part of the handicap that I have to overcome in 6-Max is that in Full Ring I do relatively well from early position and relatively poorly from middle position. Since early position is what is "taken out" of the 6-max game, I have to try to improve my middle position game to compensate. To be frank, all of the stuff you read about the differences in FR vs 6-Max between button vs either of the blinds, or reraises from button over cut-off, are overstated, and it was the assumption by me that opponents would be generally looser and more aggressive in these situations that caused me to come unstuck. If I'd played my normal FR game in these scenarious, I would have saved a lot of money.
Anyhow, moving from a couple of hundred up to a hundred down because of a bad hour at a "low-stakes" game, rather pissed me off. So I went back to FR on Party, first at 50c-$1 and, when the seats became available, at $1-$2. It only took an hour to win back $160 of the $300 I'd lost, and that was enough to ameliorate the feelings of annoyance -- not least because it was nice to feel confident at $1-$2 again -- something that the excessive volatility of last March/April had rather battered out of me.
So, the bankroll is static, concealing the pleasing news of beating the Stars 50c-$1 in open play for a couple of days, a comfortable perfomance at $1-$2 on Party, and a complete fucking disaster (but a learning experience) at 6-Max. As long as I stay away from reading the hand histories on 2+2, I'll be okay.
________
Still, $300 isn't much in the grand scheme of things, and I expected to lose money while learning opponents' general ranges. Well, I certainly did that tonight. As a general rule, it's just like full ring for most players. If the money goes in, then they have the hand. All these ideas that players are pushing thin value are, at this level, not particularly true. Well, they aren't true at all. It's just like playing the reg-tags on Stars. I would have done far better just to play my normal Full Ring game, ignoring the first three positions.
Part of the handicap that I have to overcome in 6-Max is that in Full Ring I do relatively well from early position and relatively poorly from middle position. Since early position is what is "taken out" of the 6-max game, I have to try to improve my middle position game to compensate. To be frank, all of the stuff you read about the differences in FR vs 6-Max between button vs either of the blinds, or reraises from button over cut-off, are overstated, and it was the assumption by me that opponents would be generally looser and more aggressive in these situations that caused me to come unstuck. If I'd played my normal FR game in these scenarious, I would have saved a lot of money.
Anyhow, moving from a couple of hundred up to a hundred down because of a bad hour at a "low-stakes" game, rather pissed me off. So I went back to FR on Party, first at 50c-$1 and, when the seats became available, at $1-$2. It only took an hour to win back $160 of the $300 I'd lost, and that was enough to ameliorate the feelings of annoyance -- not least because it was nice to feel confident at $1-$2 again -- something that the excessive volatility of last March/April had rather battered out of me.
So, the bankroll is static, concealing the pleasing news of beating the Stars 50c-$1 in open play for a couple of days, a comfortable perfomance at $1-$2 on Party, and a complete fucking disaster (but a learning experience) at 6-Max. As long as I stay away from reading the hand histories on 2+2, I'll be okay.
________
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Hand Histories
Date: 2011-01-03 07:23 pm (UTC)Taking a non-poker viewpoint -- say I'm a consultant GP on a drug trial -- there's no double-blind; there's not even a single-blind.
Or to take a naive viewpoint which is somewhat closer to poker but related to, say, my field of computer software (theoretically we have peer reviews, but to be absolutely frank with you they don't happen as often as they should do, and they're generally procedurally fucked when they do. Check with Mike on this one): it isn't actually the 2+2 blogger/reviewer who has a useful viewpoint, it's the commenters.
Now, it has to be said that the commenters on this particular blog seem to be somewhat perspicacious. On the other hand, there are about five or ten of them ... and they're either hand-picked or self-selected. I suspect the commenters on 2+2 are more, shall we say, diverse.
Anyway, the bottom line, as it were, is the meta-meta-game. You can play poker as a game. You can go on-line and meta-game. But the meta-meta-game is where you ask yourself, is it worth spending all that time for $14K a year?
Personally, I would. That would be roughly twenty Red Sox games a year, with a nice comfortable hotel room thrown in. On the other hand (and assuming I could reach your 30+ years of experience inside, say, a very concentrated six months), I'd be better off giving total strangers a blow-job down the local public toilets.
It's a matter of taste, when it comes down to it.