half a million hands of high stakes limit holdem (graph, thoughts)

[baronzeus]

not many people know my backstory but to start off, here is my graph lifetime of high stakes, primarily 50/100+. this is 1.5 years of high stakes, out of 2 years worth of total poker play.




a few interesting things. these thoughts are choppy and im just typing them out as i think of them

the first 250K hands or so were within the first year of me playing poker, and 6 months of playing high stakes. admittedly i wasnt very good at poker during that time. I ran pretty hot and played decently which led to good results. overall though, game no game selection + high variance + mediocre play = bad results. you can see i only won 500 bb in the first 250K hands, including a 1500BB downswing.

the last 250K hands have been vastly different. Ive only had one 200BB+ downswing (about 500BB, at hand 430K or so). people hear me talk about not having 200BB downswings and worrying when i hit those, but generally i dont think people should have those. often.

in the last 250K hands i am about 1.2BB/100. one thing to note is that all of these recent hands are post-party poker era. this is when people have claimed the games have "dried up" so I cant really complain about my winrate, althoguh I like to think im better than 1.2BB/100

I constantly work on my game and I think its evident by my (clearly) greater success in the last year vs my first year. ive only been playing poker for 2 years and i feel like one of the top LHE players in the world, esp wrt HU.

generally one note to make to players is that my results have been considerably worse at the higher limits (200/400+) than at the lower limits (50/100-100/200). i think i'm something like 1.4BB/100 at the lower limits and only .8BB/100 at the higher limits, or something. im only partially upset about this, because i want to be the best, but i think that the competition is much tougher at the highest limits and there is little opportunity for game selection.

i think with more work on my game i can become even better. i constantly think about things and try to make my play better. every time i see another player do something i compare it to what i do and decide what i like better and why.

ring games are good but in general there is a lot less to be won than shorter handed games. players are still fairly bad, and we need as many chances to exploit them as possible.


seriously, game selection is so huge. i cant stress this enough. im a bad example because i dont really exercise this but if i had to guess, i run about 2BB/100 in "good" games, and 0.7BB/100 in "bad" games. the problem is its boring to wait around for a fish, especially nowadays when there arent many fish to go around.

i classify myself from a year ago as a fish.
\

i am an exponentially better player now than i was a year ago.