another year, another transition

[Hoopster81]

I started playing full-time a little over a year ago. I was 10-tabling $50NL full-ring and bonus whoring the majority of the time. I wasn't making much, but I was certainly making enough to pay my rent and cover my small living expenses.

Then, almost exactly a year ago, the Party skins split. When this happened, I lost $300-400 / mo in those reload bonuses, and knew I had to make some changes to make it work. I always had read people say that 6-max games were where it was at, but I was too content at fullring/too much of a pussy to try it out. The day after the skins split, I started playing 6-max and played a hand of full-ring since.

I 8-tabled the 6-max games in the beginning, but moved to 10 and then 12 fairly quickly. I typically ran at 16/12 or so. Playing that many tables (for me anyway) made it real tough to get any kind of reads (other than all the HUD stats) and forces you into a pretty weak-tight style. However, I was playing so many hands/hour and there were so many fish playing at Party, that I made good money. I moved up limits pretty fast and have been playing a mix of $400NL and $600NL for a few months now. I built my bankroll from nothing to about $120K today.

My goal since the beginning has been to make as mouch money as possible. I don't care about playing high level poker just to play it. I don't care about running crazy bluffs on 2+2ers just to do it. I just want to make as much money/hour as I can. Period. For a long time, I think nitting it up on Party and playing max tables with great game selection was the way to do that. However, I think those days are over. Even if Party wasn't going away, I have found my style has become less profitable in the last few months. Now, this is probably due to a few things. Better TAGs, less fish, etc. Regardless, the loss of Party is obviously a bad thing for a player like myself.

The first law of nature is adapt or die. I think it is time for me to make some significant changes to my game. Starting today, I am going to drop tables (I'll start at 8, but drop more if I feel need to) and develop more of a 22-24/16-18 game. Hopefully, the learning curve will be steep and I won't drop too many buy-ins in the process.

Anyways, I had just been thinking about this all day, and wanted to write it out. I would appreciate any comments/words of wisdom from former nits who made this transition or other people who can imagine what it would be like.


Summary: I only care about maximizing $/hr. For a long time, I believe the best way to do that was to nit up the Party games. Now those days are over and I think I need to really work on opening up my game.