[SykoraG]

Alllllllllllllrighty. My stats:
24/12/4

I've just logged my 140 000th hand at micro stakes and it's time to move up. My roll is sitting around 4k, of which 2k of that has been made in the past two months.

I've been a long time reader, and I find myself more passive than active in this forum. Here's some tips along with my bankroll history:

I started playing NL in June this summer at Party. My Bankroll was 600 (I was a 10+1 donkament pro), when my 2p2er friend convinced me that the real moneyz was lying in NL cash games. In my first day I went on a 15 buyin heater at 25 NL, and thought I was a poker God. My next 60 000 hands however would not be so fortunate. Over those 60 000 hands, my roll fluctuated between 200 and 1200. I did a few 2 - 300 withdrawls for spending money / bills, however I couldn't seem to find the success I was looking for. I was effectively running at 3bb/100 at 25/50NL. The cash was slow, the beats were painful, the tilt was frequent. But how could this be? A few things in the past month(s) that didn't seem like leaks, but sure as hell were hurting my game.

(1) - Noticing my table relative to my position

Now what does this mean? It means that before you act, before you contemplate calling, stealing the blinds, or making that standard 4x bb raise, take a look at who is left to act, who is likely to call and who is likely to raise/ reraise you. One of my biggest leaks as a starting NL player was not paying enough attention to the players at my table. I wanted to play as many tables as possible, and take as much money from those fishies as I could. Instead, alot of the time those fish ended up getting the best of me.
Here's a pretty standard scenario that I hope you can learn from:
25NL
I'm on the button. MP open limps. It gets to me and I'm looking at ace 9 suited. I raise to 5x bb. SB calls. BB calls. and MP calls. What I failied to realize before raising because I was multitabling, is that SB is 70/15 and BB is 80/9. MP, who open limped, is 25 / 0 (all three players also have low flop fold frequency). The value I attempted to gain from raising on the button, was ultimately lost because I didn't pay enough attention to the tables players. This also goes for raising OOP (out of position) and steal attempts.

(2) - Knowing when to quit

I can't stress more that tilting is the most devastating and fastest way to deplete your bankroll. The moment I feel that I'm playing for revenge; I "try" and shut down all my tables and lift some weights or hit the bag(I have a gym just outside of my room, comes in handy lol). A few techniques I've learned in dealing with tilt are:
1) Say your actions out loud, as if you were a narrating a story
2) Lookover a hand where you totally sucked out a 2p2er; where you called without odds and struck gold.

(3) - Become your own player, with your own stats (by playing more and more and more and ...)

When reading 2+2 in the beggining, I often found myself trying to emulate successful players and the stats they put forth. I would often read that so n so is a winning player, and he runs at 22 / 18. Does that mean you'll be successful running at those same stats? Hell no! Play alot of hands, and figure out what you're most comfortable with. As I said at the beggining of this post, I'm running at 24/12. In my experience, micro games are very passive, with alot of limping. Limping behind those passive players for me proved more successful at times than raising. I'm sure as I move up, the game will become tighter so steal attempts will be more frequent; for me, 24/12 just worked. There are hundreds of possible scenarios


These are a few aspects of the micro game that I find fundamentaly important. There's plenty of other things, like learning to become TAG before you consider LAG, etc ... which have been covered excessively in this forum. I haven't really made a name for myself, nor am I sure anyone will really care, but I hope this might help someone out. I went through these problems, so I'm sure I'm not the only one.