moving up

[Sarge85]

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200 bb's

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So if I take a shot at a recap:
Over 2 years, you built up an $800 bankroll.
A couple weeks ago you doubled it to $1600.
A week ago you lost it all.
Now you wonder if you should be playing $20/40.

It sounds to me like you've been seriously under-bankrolled all along and only needed a bout of bad luck to break you. You're lucky you went 2 years without having that bout.

In order to safely play 20/40 you need (at least) three things:
1) a minimum bankroll of $12K (300BBs)
2) a basic understanding of bankroll management
3) the ability to beat better players, on average, than those that play 4/8.

It doesn't appear as though you have any of those 3 requisites.

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Pwn'ed. NH

Sarge[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img]

[KurtSF]

I felt like I may have been a bit of a [censored] with my previous post, so as promised here is the detailed response.

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ive been playing 4$-8$ limit at foxwoods now for about 2 years.during that time ive managed to build a modest bankroll, with one very good session in wich i doubled my bankroll a few weeks ago, wich brings me to last week.during 2 24 hour sessions, i lost it all.on tables where i should have done well

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Sounds brutal. Until your next post.

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200 bb's

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So that's 200BBs in about 1500 hands. Which is totally standard. I don't want to diminish the pain of losing $1600 at the tables in one week, but it sounds like in the preceeding 2 years you have been extreemely lucky not to experience any variance like this.

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by the way, how often should one expect these bad luck outings with a limited bankroll?

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Size of bankroll is irrelevant, but i you play long enough it _will_ happen, over and over again. Perhaps the idea of Risk of Ruin will help you understand this. Check out a RoR calculator like this one to see how this is actually not that unusual. Before you doubled up you were playing 4-8 with a $800 bankroll, let's say you are a standard winning player, winning 1BB per hour. Standard deviation for LHE is usually around 15-16 BB/hour, certainly if you're playing in a loose game with bad players. (In those games you can expect to win more, but you can also expect to have bigger swings.) According to the calculator, based on the size of your roll and these generic assumptions, the liklyhood of you going broke was 45%! Seriously. Even after you doubled up it was 20% likley to happen. And that's IFF the assumptions are good.

I do not think its safe to assume you are a winning player. How much have you played? Genereally to have any confidence in your calculated win rate (BB/hour or BB/100) you should have 10k to 30k hands, otherwise the effects of luck in idividual hands is just too strong to draw a conclusion about your true winrate. That's 400-1000 hours of live play. Have you put in that kind of time over the last 2 years? And how much were you winning? If you had a $800 bankroll a few weeks ago, how much did you start out with at the start of the 2 years? If you started with $200 and got up to $1600 you did 8x your money (which is rather impressive), but you won only 175BB. Did you start with $400 and got up to $1600? That's only 150BB. If you did put in 1000 hours at the casino (did you?) your win rate is about .15BB per hour. That makes you a solid break even player, only because of the number of hands. But if you haven't put in that mcuh time you really don't know, and there's no evidence that you're not just a losing player that's been lucky.

The long run is a lot longer than you think. And the swings are a lot bigger than you think. Sure, some players will never experience a downswing of 200BB like yours, but it is common and even expected that a winning payer wil go thourgh something like this at some point. For an unproven player its virtually assured.

Now maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you are a proven winning player, maybe you have a proven history of beating this game, maybe your and my terminolgy is different and I'm misunderstanding what your saying. But for all intents and puposes what you're describing is just a run of bad luck, and a fundamental misunderstanding of bankroll managment, and certainly a misunderstanding of the effects of variance. As well as other things, which I'll get to.

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i also believe ive aquired enough skill to beat these low level games, yet my bankroll tells another story.

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Why is that? This is a serious question not a put down. Is it beccause you are not actually a winning player in these games as you expect, or is it becuase you hit a sick run of bad luck? Its very hard to tell the difference.

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evaluating my play on those last 2 sessions,the only thing i can come up with is that maybe i should try playing higher limits[10$-20$, 20$- 40$] before giving up entirly.

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Thinking that bad players are unbeatable and that you should jump up in levels to where you can beat the game is one of the most common and pervasive MIS-conceptions around. The standard response around these parts is "move up to where they respect your raises," which, by the way, is sarcasm. It is possible your "style" is more appropriate to a different game, but the problem in that case is not that you are in the wrong game, but rather that your style is inflexible.

As an aside, it may be worth moving up to get away from the atrocious rake at the low-limits, but that is entirly different than the quality of play issue.

The super-loose low limit games are a money machine, and are beatable at an outrageous rate. That said, thay are also extemely volatile, and you will both hit huge upswings (like when you won $800 in one session) and huge downswings (like when you lost $1600 over 2 sessions). The key is to always make the right decisions and the right moves at every point, and to play enough hands that the good luck and the bad luck even out. You seem to believe that the abysmal poker being played by your oponents makes beating this game impossible. If we're quoting 2+2, in SSHE p.14, "This notion is, of course, absurd. [...] People who equate poker to craps lose, not because the game is unbeatable, but because they make numerous mistakes." And on p.16 "Every cent of your long-term profit playing poker comes from exploiting your opponents errors and predictable tendancies. The more numerous and egregious their errors, the more money you can make."

Now as I said before, while you will have a higher expected win rate, you will also have bigger swings. You WILL get sucked out on constantly, you WILL bet up the second best hand a lot, and you WILL miss draws all the time. You will lose A LOT of hands. The idea is to win money, not hands, and this is eminantly possible in these games. There is so much dead money in the pot in these games you can lose 5 pots for every one you win and still make out like a bandit. Learn this! Its not about how often you win, but about how much.

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i guess i should learn to read people better so i can muck full houses and nut flushes when i know their beat.

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Maybe, maybe not. But what I can tell you is not folding that full house that got beat was not your biggest mistake of the night. It wasn't really a big mistake. In fact, it proably wasn't a mistake at all to go to showdown with it. Learning when to fold a monster will not help your game much in the least in LHE. Learning pot odds inside and out and learning to bet for value, on the other hand, wil make or break your game. Don't sweat the busted boats. Its really not a big problem.

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my reasoning for moving up in limits is that it seems that i win smaller pots against better players and lose bigger pots against weak players.

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As has already been stated, this is what happens when your opponents are better than you.

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i truly believe if i played against better players during my last break session,although i probably would have had a losing session,i would not have gone broke, maybe even won a little.im i wrong for thinking this?

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Most likely, yes, you are wrong in thinking this. While its possible that with the same cards dealt and a totally different table you will have made out better, though if the "different" table is a better table, its more likly they would have extracted extra bets from you when you did lose and made it even more expensive than it was. The fact that you were winning small pots against good players is an idication that they already "respect your raises". Why do you expect this will win more money at higher stakes? The fact that you are losing big pots against poor players suggests that either you are making numerous mistakes yourself or you are getting extremely unlucky. Either is likely; both are probable.

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ive studied low limit stakes books by skansky and miller and i try to bring thier theories to the table, but more often than not they backfire against stupid players while i tend to do better against better opponants.can you give any reason for this?

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Some reasons:

(1) You fundamentally misunderstand the concepts.
(2) You understand the concepts, but not HOW to apply them.
(3) You don't know WHEN to apply them.
(4) Your opponents know the same concepts and you have no edge over the other players.
(5) You are applying the wrong concepts.
(6) Your preflop play is fine, but your postflop play is losing you money.
(7) Your postflop play is fine, but you are either too loose or too tight for the game you're in and your post-flop play cannot make up for it.
(8) You have an attribution bias for the hands you are in. You think your opponents are winning because they are stupid, but infact you have much less equity in individual pots than you imagine.
(9) You are losing and tilting or otherwise spewing and do not realize it. Downward spiral.

Re #5, raising on the turn to give improper odds and drive drawing hands out of the pot (per your example in HEPFAP) is useless and irrelevant if you opponents don't know what pot odds are. If they do know pot odds and there are 8 of them in the pot and you did nothing to drive them out on the flop, they probably had odds to chase anyway and are playing correctly. Note that this often happens with bad players, that the pots are so bloated that calling-stations often are playing correctly.

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ive been playing lowlimit online poker much longer than live.

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This is encourageing. If you are a better player online than live, perhaps you should focus on what is different in the games.

(1) First of all you may be giving tells, or just as importantly failing to pick up on them. If everytime you have a good hand you shake as you place your bet, everyone will fold, causing you to "win the small pots." Conversly, if your oponents know when you are weak they can push you off, even if they don't have it. I'm a B&M noob myself and I don't have any advice here, but you should definitly be aware of the differences between live and online plpay if your results are really that much different.

(2) Online games are much tighter than live games. What levels do you play online? You may have adjusted to this different character of game, and are unable to adjust back to playing against weak opponents. This is not a flaw of your opponents, but of yours. Learn to adapt your game to the one you are in.

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theres a reason why poor players are sucking out on me with 1 or 2 outers and at the frequency its been happening lately, i cannot blame it on luck.

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As I sated in my previous post, yes, it can be luck. Right behind the misconception that you would fare better against better opponenets is the misconception of how much influence skill and luck have on the game. The variance is tremendous and can have immense impact on your results. Until you have evidence that your results are NOT variance, really you can attribute almost everything and anything to it. The 100BB upswings and the 200BB downswings may have nothing to do with your play.

But the only way to find out is to prove otherwise. Which means you should take a continuous-improvement approach to your game. Always be learning, always be studying, always be improving. There is always room to get better... do it!

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there has to be other ways i can play against weakies to prevent this. thats why i posted this thread.

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There are. You can't prevent the 200BB losses. Those just suck, and will just happen. But you can become a better player so that in the long run you will win. If you systematicly and consistantly make the right choices the losing will come to an end eventually, against any kind of player, definitly against "weakies". First focus on your play, and making sure you are always playing well and making the best decisions possible. The money will come.

Regarding the specific "other ways" to play against "weakies", no one person or one post is going to fix your game. Read Small Stakes Holdem, read other books, read and post hands in the forums here, take notes at the table, go over your sessions, and practice practice practice.

Hey, maybe I'm being condescending and an A-hole. Maybe you're a poker stud and have no use for what i have to say. But from your posts you seem to have a significant misunderstanding of some basic poker concepts.

Hey, if you can take this razzing and still want to come back and learn, welcome!

[Harv72b]

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24 hour sessions are not a bad idea. In fact, i think they're a great idea. The longer you play the more you minimize variance. A while back i put in around 1k hours over the period of 4 months or so. I also put in around 6 sesssions all of which were 24 hours or longer. I came out a loser zero of those times. There would be points in the day where I would lose over and over again to two outters or runner runner flushes/straights. I remember one 24 hour sessoin where this old gentlemen hit a 2 outter against me 3 pots in a row. I couldn't believe his luck. Finally, variance worked itself out. He stopped hitting his 2 outters and eventually lost everything in front of him and in his wallet. My point in this litte story is that variance WILL work itself out. People's incredible luck never lasts forever. At the end of the 4 months i had a horrible streak of luck; I had 14 losing sessions in a row whereas I never had more than 3 in a row in over 4 months. This was playing 3/6 and 4/8 kill btw (mostly 3/6 though). My bankroll was about $2500 (more than double yours in terms of BB). Despite losing that $2500, I was still up about $3000 in that 4 month period.

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Let me rephrase that--the 24 hour sessions are generally a bad idea. If the generic "you" are capable of playing good poker for 24 hours straight (or with a couple short breaks), and the table is good enough that it is still +EV for you to play there, then yes, there's no problem with logging a 24 hour table session. The thing is, those two things are not going to come together very often for the typical small stakes player, and the tables are usually going to be just as good tomorrow or next weekend.

[fuzz66]

i started playing 2-4 with 200$,became frustrated with break even session after break even session, i decided to study more about playing lag's and lap's[schoonmakers book ''the psychology of poker''was a great help]and i moved to 4-8. i found 4-8 less frustrating and a little more profitable, although the swings were larger, obviously, i began to have more winning sessions.it was either a winning session or a losing one, but i felt i was learning more from 4-8.then , about 3 weeks ago, everything i studied came togather on a table with mostly lpp's and one certified pshyco. i was able to position myself2 seats to the left of the maniac, and the other players were fine with letting me isolate him. i doubled what i had in about 4 hours.since then my bankroll and my confidence were broken.in my last 2 sessions, it seemed i could do no right.excrutiating bad beats, strong draws that never got there time and time again, along with hours of unplayable pockets.i know i havent been playing live long, but even in my years online ive never experienced this.i noticed toward the end of thesesessions i began playing more passive, afraid to take controll of a hand,chasing bad draws.it has definatly affected my play. i made a copy of your last response kurt, and i intend to adress each one of your suggestions. there all excellent in my opinion. so, its back to the drawing board. thank you all for your responses.

[SeaEagle]

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then , about 3 weeks ago, everything i studied came togather on a table with mostly lpp's and one certified pshyco. i was able to position myself2 seats to the left of the maniac, and the other players were fine with letting me isolate him. i doubled what i had in about 4 hours.

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Fuzz, it's really important that you understand that this session wasn't "everything you studied coming together". Even without seeing the hands, I can confidently say that the deck hit you in the face. In poker, luck far outweighs skill, and it takes thousands of hands for the small skill factor to make enough difference to overcome the luck. Until you understand that on any given night the cards you are dealt make the biggest single impact on your win/loss and your skill only modifies your win/loss by a smallish amount, you'll not be able to manage the ups and downs of poker.

[fuzz66]

do you think if i had been sitting to his right, or if i respected his raises and did not adjust my starting requirments and not isolated him so much, or folded weak or moderate hands the outcome would have been different.without what i had learned, i dont think i would have had half the session i had.i probably hadnt even taken full advantage of the situation. a better player may have even showed much more profit on that table.

[The DaveR]

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i started playing 2-4 with 200$,became frustrated with break even session after break even session, i decided to study more about playing lag's and lap's[schoonmakers book ''the psychology of poker''was a great help]and i moved to 4-8. i found 4-8 less frustrating and a little more profitable, although the swings were larger, obviously, i began to have more winning sessions.it was either a winning session or a losing one, but i felt i was learning more from 4-8.then , about 3 weeks ago, everything i studied came togather on a table with mostly lpp's and one certified pshyco. i was able to position myself2 seats to the left of the maniac, and the other players were fine with letting me isolate him. i doubled what i had in about 4 hours.since then my bankroll and my confidence were broken.in my last 2 sessions, it seemed i could do no right.excrutiating bad beats, strong draws that never got there time and time again, along with hours of unplayable pockets.i know i havent been playing live long, but even in my years online ive never experienced this.i noticed toward the end of thesesessions i began playing more passive, afraid to take controll of a hand,chasing bad draws.it has definatly affected my play. i made a copy of your last response kurt, and i intend to adress each one of your suggestions. there all excellent in my opinion. so, its back to the drawing board. thank you all for your responses.

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I want everyone in Small Stakes to read this. Every time you bemoan a bad run or variance, reread this. Good players don't attribute good results solely to skill but everyone else does. The logic of this post is why games are good.

[SeaEagle]

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do you think if i had been sitting to his right, or if i respected his raises and did not adjust my starting requirments and not isolated him so much, or folded weak or moderate hands the outcome would have been different.

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Yes. I would guess that you would have made $600 that night had you sat at any seat at the table and played an ABC game with the same cards. And quite frankly, I'm being really generous. The standard is that a good player is about 6BB/100 better than an average player. I don't know how many hands you played that night, but a 9 hour session is going to equate to about $150 in 'skill difference' on average and, based on this thread, it doesn't appear to me that you're 6BBs better than an average player.

[SeaEagle]

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I want everyone in Small Stakes to read this. Every time you bemoan a bad run or variance, reread this. Good players don't attribute good results solely to skill but everyone else does. The logic of this post is why games are good.

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Nicely said.

[fuzz66]

im glad your able to use my ignorance as an example for other players dave.''winning poker players....objectivley analyze how they and thier opponants play,accept responsibility instead of putting all the blame on bad luck, work hard on thier game, and ask thier friends for critical comments''. if i honestly take responsibility for my losses and not blame it all on bad luck, why isnt it the same for winning?