AKQJ10's Poker Blog

Poker thought of the day/month/whatever: The most underrated absolutely essential poker skill, even more underrated than its parent game selection, is game evaluation.   If you can’t tell whether you’re in a good game, irrespective of results, you can’t win in the long run.

So, it feels like a good time to take stock of what’s working for me, what’s not, and how I can move what’s in the second category into the first.

What is my “bread and butter” game?

In other words, what game can I play at high volume to make money reliably?

Tournaments (with caveats)

• Major tournament sats: FTOPS, MiniFTOPS, WCOOP.  I played these for a week straight during the MiniFTOPS in December.   They’re wonderful.   You don’t even have to play the sat targets; just cash out T$ or FTP when you win.
• Scheduled limit MTTs, HE and O8, ~30-50 players, buy-in $5 to $33: Granted that I’m running outrageously good (2 firsts and a shared first this month), but these seem like a gold mine.   The player base is as bad as any MTT of these stakes, but limit games keep the fields reasonable which diminishes variance compared to bigger tourneys.
• 45-player NLHE sit-and-gos, $5.50 and $11; less favorable are $6.50 and $12 turbos.
• NLO8 and PLO8 tourneys: I want to learn big-bet O8 (see below), and doing it against a field that knows even less than me is ideal.

Drawbacks to tourneys:

• Hard to schedule – You can’t just go hang out in the coffee shop for an hour or less while playing poker like you can with ring games.
• Higher variance – We can partially make up for this with volume, because S&Gs are easier to multitable, but there’s still a lot more variance.

So I figure I need something else in the bread-and-butter category…..

Limit Omaha 8

Why?

• I expect non-hold ‘em games to be less “saturated”.    This isn’t really scientific, just a hunch, but with the explosion of training resources on HE and especially NLHE, even given greater game selection in those games I expect non-HE to reward flexibility and less by-the-book thinking.   Don’t get married to this hunch though.
• Limit games seem to suit my personality a lot more.   This is not as true online where multitabling can keep big-bet games from becoming boring as paste, though.
• Split-pot games are supposed to help control variance.

I’ve tried to specialize in online LO8 since about November 2009.   But a funny little thing happened around December 12.

25c/50c through $3/$6, first 13648 hands: +2.12 BBet/100, +$501

25c/50c through $3/$6, all 22083 hands: -0.48 BBet/100, -$291

As you can imagine this is a little vexing.   Apparently my O8 game needs work.   After all, 20K hands is supposed to be fairly significant, right?    But does going from 14K to 20k hands magically change the prognosis from “You could just be running good” to “You’re a certain loser”?   All I can infer is that variance is much worse than I thought, or that I’m more subject to subtle tilt than I thought.

My next post will concern my plan to get out of this rut.    I am vaguely aware of a few things I’m doing poorly, or that I do worse when I run bad.    I likely bluff too much, especially in shorthanded pots.    I make too many crying and hero calls.    I don’t value bet thin enough on the river, particularly when I’m running bad.   So I’m sure there are leaks that we can get out of my game.

Anyway, it’s probably a good idea to move down stakes for a while while reconstructing my game.   But if I’m going to do that, I could also play a game I’m still very much learning….

Big-bet Omaha 8

Why?

• Newer game – less literature, possibly more fish (not sure about this though)
• Big-bet games are more profitable when a couple of fish are in them.

I keep thinking this would be a good game to learn from the ground up.   I’ve been short-stacking NL25 (and sometimes PL25), and occasionally full-stacking PL10.  I need to play it more, especially deep stacked.   I don’t because it feels wasteful to play at low stakes.  Also, good games dry up very quickly, and it’s not rare to end up in a 20/4 rock garden where the reasonable players are just shoving their AA preflop for 50xbb or more.   I don’t really find those games fun.    But when you get a fish in these, boy howdy, are they good.

I expect to have about 10 to 30 hours weekly for poker from now until grad school.   Now I just have to allocate that time among the above three categories, and also to purchase enough and allow enough time for training to get better at them.