Only 2910 hands in the week

I was a bit annoyed that I was only able to play just over 10 hours this week. I had been really positive about my move down to $1-$2 and was really pleased that results had been so good. All I wanted to do was consolidate on my good start and grind out some decent hours. This never really happened, despite having a couple of days off work, and so I am able to reflect on a winning week of only $700 or so when I feel as though I should have played almost twice as much as I did.

I actually played pretty well all week and can only really recall one serious blunder, where I triple-barrelled with an unimproved AK and was shown a full house. Doh!

My results at $1-$2 remain impressive and I started to wonder how much of this was down to the cards running well and how much was down to my edge in the game. Obviously, because I have played only 15k hands many regular multi-tablers will say that there is nowhere near enough data to draw any conclusions. I partly agree with this. However, I have played about 85k hands in the last year, fairly evenly split between the $100, $200, $400 and $1000 buy-in games. My PTBB/100 across all levels comes out at 2.41, including 31k hands at $1000 buy-in at 2.33. This indicates that I am probably a solid winner at all of these levels, and you would expect that I am a bigger winner at the lower levels, so maybe a win-rate of 4 to 5 PTBB/100 is sustainable at the $200 buy-in game.

In addition to the stats there is the general feel of how the hands have played out. For example, I believe I often get an extra value bet out of my opponents where some of the other regulars in the game are happy to check it through. Also, I feel as though I have an edge pre-flop against some of the regulars, who I expect are decent winning players, due to the fact that they have wide discrepancies in their 3-bet raising and 4-bet calling / 5-bet shoving ranges[1].

One thing that I have started to change is the frequency of playing low pairs ie. 88 and down. Basically I have downgraded these hands and will not always play them for a single raise like I did before. The reason for this is two-fold: first, there is the higher possibility of flopping a set-under-set; and second, when out of position it is often very difficult to win a big pot if you do flop a set. Set-under-set is a total disaster: it’s the easiest way to lose a full buy-in whilst having next-to-zero pot equity. Minimising the situations where this can happen should be a profitable exercise.

It was nice to receive a comment on the blog last week. Thanks Rossi! I know there are some regular readers out there because I occasionally check to see where people are connecting from. I would like to hear any comments from readers, no matter what the content. Don't be shy!

I hope to play as many as 15 hours this week but with other commitments it may not be possible. What I must avoid is being over-eager when I do actually play. I need to be aggressive but not try to force the action where it’s not possible. This is a fine line to walk but I think it’s one of the keys to success.


[1] Example, some regulars play maybe 21% (ie. not many) of their hands pre-flop, but they raise with almost all of them. So, when they re-raise my button raise, this means that they probably do this with as many as 15% of their hands. To me this is too often and with many of these hands they will simply fold to an all-in re-re-raise. This means that I can show a clear profit with this re-re-raise, as it doesn’t get called often enough, as long as I don’t overdo it, and as long as they don’t adjust to what I am doing.