Moving to Small Stakes - My Micro experience

[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.

[SykoraG]

Bump before bed

[redCashion]

Nice post Syk..

Knowing when to quit is probably the most important lesson here, and one I think one 99% of us micro/low grinders have trouble with.

[JackA]

[ QUOTE ]
1) Say your actions out loud, as if you were a narrating a story

[/ QUOTE ]

I've found this to be a big help. I'll say or whisper my reads on my opponents. I also recently fiddled with recording a video for the heck of it, and that was really helpful. Just narrating my session was really good. Even if you junk the video afterwards, the process of narrating is quite beneficial.

Good stuff, thanks for sharing your thoughts as you move up.

[Everlong]

Thanks,

Nive inspirational post with good advice I will try and take to heart.
All the best at SSNL!

[ablick]

I have had similar experiences. Lower you play, more passively you should play. I sometimes go as far as raising preflop only with AA, KK, QQ and AK. Notice that this is only for really loose tables, like those ones at NL10 on Saturdays when people play drunk. They are there to play, so they wont lay down hands like KT preflop for a raise, so why raise with JJ, when you’ll get at least four callers. Of course if it gets folded to you and you are on LP with TT, raising is mandatory, but this doesn’t happen that often at tables described above. I’m not saying that you should fold hands like JJ preflop, call and raise the flop if you like it. That way you are able to control the pot size and you’ll most of the time get money in as a big favourite.

I used to play more aggressively, but although I made nice profit, I had also quite high variance. When I decided to be bit more selective with my raising hands, my profit increased a lot.

So looser the table, fewer hands you should raise preflop and vice versa. At least this is the style, that I have felt most comfortable.

[lacrymosa]

nice post

[ChipStorm]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
1) Say your actions out loud, as if you were a narrating a story

[/ QUOTE ]

I've found this to be a big help. I'll say or whisper my reads on my opponents. I also recently fiddled with recording a video for the heck of it, and that was really helpful. Just narrating my session was really good. Even if you junk the video afterwards, the process of narrating is quite beneficial.

Good stuff, thanks for sharing your thoughts as you move up.

[/ QUOTE ]
Nice post. Schoonmaker specifically mentions this practice in Psychology Of Poker: if you force yourself to verbalize your thinking, you avoid a lot of fundamentally dumb play. I do it less now but for marginal hands it's the most useful technique I know for avoiding lagtard tilt play.

[SykoraG]

Cool, I just stumbled upon this technique on my own. It's great that this is an already proven technique.

[ama0330]

Nice post. I like the part about not trying to emulate others and trusting your reads to determine your play. If you think that you can get away with limping T9s in UTG+1, then you should, no matter who tells you to pitch it or raise it.