I've been grinding $20+$1 6-max turbo DoN's on Bovada for about a month and a half now to the tempo of around 10 games per day on average. I'm well aware of the inherent variance in poker but it seems like I've been running extremes in either way, both upswing and downswing, so I'm suspecting my own play and thanks to Bovada's anonymous play, there's no way for me to go back and study my games. With that, I bring you this situation from a game that I just played. We're about 20 hands into the game and I have literally opened one pot up to this point (225 chips w/ AA UTG, blinds at 50/100. I was holding about 1400 chips. Thoughts on bet sizing?). I'm currently on the button with 1480 chips and blinds are now 75/150. The SB has 1100 chips and the BB has 1925 chips. Everyone at the table is fairly equal in chips and we're still 6-handed. Everyone folds to me on the button and I've got 99. In this situation, I'm looking at the BB with around 40 VPIP and thinking that if I simply min-raise, he's calling and there's a lot that I don't want to see hit a flop. On the other hand, if I shove than there's a good chance that he's gonna call anyway but likely with a pretty solid underdog (99 is just within the top 5% of hands according to the stove). I'm also thinking that given this being my 2nd hand to open, he may respect the bet and lay down. In any case, I shove, SB folds, BB snaps off (reasonably?) with QQ and holds to take me out. Now to my question... Should I have shoved here or just min-bet and folded to a re-shove or taken some other line altogether? I'm not really concerned with the outcome of this hand in and of itself, I'm just wondering whether I've missing some fundamental point that's causing these major swings of mine. For what it's worth, my roll has been hovering between $800 and $1200 so I'm not really concerned with losing a buy-in 2 out of 5 times or so, so long as I'm moving in the right direction. On THAT note, any DoN grinders have any advice on expected ROI at this type of game? Maybe I'm just expecting too much. Thanks in advance for any insight.

Ugh bodog...

Well I used to play over there before they made that switch to anon. I played for like a month beyond that and absolutely hated it.

In those situations when you have a marginal type of hand I have no problem with just pushing vs fish who tend to call opens light, but I don't think it's optimal. If you have 99 in position vs a fish who is going to call you while you're both 10bb deep, assuming you aren't on the bubble, you should really be in chip gaining mode. 99 is a pretty good hand to raise with with the intention of getting post flop vs a wide range knowing that you're going to be ahead on the flop almost all the time and your range is very high card heavy so you can rep top pair a lot vs villain's 2nd or 3rd pairs. Sure sometimes you get shoved on and you get put into a difficult spot, but unless you're against a good player you typically aren't going to be getting 3bet bluffed on a lot without a crazy image so you'll tend to want to raise/fold.

Imo you're getting the big swings because you're playing 6 max games which are a lot more swingy because optimal ranges are looser. Unfortunately Bodog only offers the 6 max games now and as far as I remember they don't offer any games over the $20 level except for like $130 games. When they made the switch on me and I wasn't set up on another network I regged the 20's for a while and managed something like a 12% roi over about 500 games and I used to get around a 10% on the 10 handed DoN turbos over there. I was one of about 5 guys pulling that high of a win rate so it definitely wasn't some anomalous thing that's impossible to reproduce. I'm guessing it's still possible for a good player to get that kind of win rate but since they removed all the higher stakes games you'll have to fight against all of the good players at the 20's now as opposed to before where the 7's and 13's were easy and the 29's and 56's had all of the good players, but there were still enough high stakes fish and reg fish for a good player to pull that kind of win rate. 5% win rate is really good if you can pull that off, but you'll definitely always have room for improvement if you're below 10% assuming the games didn't get significantly tougher.

Thank you emitnulB for your comments. I just tabulated all of my $20+$1 games for the last 31 days and came out to a current ROI of 4.8% over like 210 games (I took a few days off in there). I suppose I'm not doing too terrible but at the same time I know that there is definitely room for improvement. Where are you playing now? I'd be happy to switch to standard SNG's but Bovada just doesn't fill 'em up fast enough to be able to multi-table. There are now $50+$2.50 and $130+$? options for the 6-max turbo DoN's at Bovada, the $50's fill up about as quick as the $20's but the $130's don't seem to get much traffic. I've tightened up my bubble play over my last 20 games (since yesterday morning) and I'm showing almost a 15% ROI so maybe that's where my leak is. I was shoving pretty wide expecting folks to fold being on the bubble and WAY too often I was still getting looked up by Ax. If I were getting the same rakeback at Bovada that I have at Carbon, that would be an automatic 1.67% ROI boost but unfortunately their DoN's don't fill up worth a darn in my experience. I've got to get to class now but I'm gonna try and get in another 10 or so games later with a mental note of patience on the bubble and see how it goes. Thanks again.

Ever wondered what that big key on the right of your keyboard does?

Juk

I switched to merge and imo it's pretty much better all around than bodog, unfortunately the games are also tougher.