Has anyone made the jump from LHE to NLHE since Black Friday? I have been considering switching since the games haven't been nearly as good but think I would rather become a tourney player rather than an actual NL grinder. Anyone have any stories to tell of their dive into the NL world?

well im new to both but I've played .02/.04/ and .05/.10 LHE about 15,000 hands so far mixed within both,,not the best player but i've shown some profit at about 1.95BB at this point.Gave 2NL a try and lost 2 buyins within an hr...gave it another go today and after about 2 hrs at the same table and 160+ hands got the buyins i lost and im now about half a buy-in up although i think i have just been lucky ..it is really a tougher decision when your betting and out of who knows where a player puts your whole stack at risk.
I plan on going thru with at least 5k hands within the next week or 2 to take it slow and just see how im doing at that point.Posting a few trouble spots here and there with stats for feedback from some fellow 2+2ers in the future..
oh yeah ,reading posts around the forum REALLYY HELPED ME make it thru!!LOL

I recently tried HU NLH SnGs and quit break-even after about 3 months of study and play. The ABC stuff is fairly straightforward and easy to learn and is enough to beat the micros. It's an interesting type of game in terms of how you have to adapt your strategy to changes in the effective stack size. I gave up after several failed attempts to move up, but lately I've been thinking of giving it another shot.

I think the loldonkaments attitude that cash players have has been a blessing to the tournament pros as it seems many mtts are still quite soft. I'll play an occasional tournament for kicks and I usually do pretty well. I guess what I have the most trouble with is the fact that you can't just up and quit whenever you feel like it. If I could get over that, I think there's a decent argument to be made for playing them full time.

What levels of HUSNG did u play?

Maxo,

What level do you play at? What type of play do you use?

Well, like I said I gave up. I would beat the 11.50 Turbos pretty easily and then lose whenever I tried to move up to the 23s. I had similar results with the STs. This is on Merge so by most reports the games are tougher even at the small stakes. Both game types require a pretty aggressive strategy. You can play the regspeeds more cautiously and secure a higher ROI, but your hourly will be less.

I honestly think I experienced some runbad whenever I tried to move up and could have eventually done better if I wanted to stick with it, but it was really just an experiment born out of frustration with the fact that Merge doesn't offer LHE HUSnGs above the $23 level (and there's not much action on those). I enjoyed the NLH games at first and it was a good learning experience, but in the end I found I just like HU LHE a lot more.

I'm hardly playing right now except for a little LHE on a smaller site. I'm about 50/50 between heading out to Vegas to make a run at the live games or just getting a regular job while waiting for fully legalized & regulated ipoker in the US.

def play tourneys if thats what you want. like muppets says, they are pretty soft. most regs avoid them due to the time commitment - its easier(and healthier) to play blocks of 1-2 hours of poker then go for a break. the tourney life is a 6-12+ binge with no more then 5 mins break every hour.

can you take a **** in 5 mins? i cant.

I haven't heard soon what's going on. How's that thing going? Is there any chance that the online poker will be legalized soon in US?

Intrastate stuff is moving along in a few States and I think Nevada at least is expected to have something up and running before end of year. Interstate (where you can play against anyone in the US instead of just people in your own State) is still pretty much up in the air. TBH, I'm not as up to speed on it as I probably should be, but I think that's about where things stand.

I ended up taking a job and will probably be willing to put small amounts of money in action on US-friendly international sites again soon. Def just looking at poker as a hobby now. This is probably easier for me to do than it might be for some others as I already have a well developed work history and I was never really a full-time pro anyway.

It's generally thought that the tournaments are easier than the cash games, all (so to say) being solid at cash games plus they have a couple of players that end up winning all the money and if you are not one of those, tough luck, move to tournaments maybe. The drag with the tournaments is that it's a drag in many ways, when it comes to bigger tournaments, and then the one table or so tournaments have soon all playing by the book and the stacks are small so personally I have a lot of doubt about tournaments but if not making it at cash games, tournaments might go better, and if even players like Hellmuth and Negreanu can win at tournaments, then I guess they might be easier.

Moving to Omaha from limit holdem was what I did when I didn't have success with NL after limit holdem in spite of reading the books and putting up a complete and exact strategy, that then didn't turn out to be worth much as players were tighter preflop and floated, plus I later found out that players play good nlh and it has been getting steadily or so harder and harder when first the US-situation became difficult, then many weak countries got isolated away from the .com sites, then the US-players got banned, and there also more and more Russian and so players started to play and the games turned out to be like two levels tougher, and of course there are less games running and the weakest players were at the smaller sites where it's dangerous to play these days and there might not be enough games either.

I learned much of my nlh strategy by figuring it out myself, of how to adjust to whatever I saw players doing (a sort of a math question really), and by observing the other players of what they were doing right and if I then agreed with it, I adopted it.

But what in my opinion improved my nlh the best, because of my lh background, was playing omaha, PLO, that is half a card game like limit holdem and half a big bet poker game like nlh, and with the support of that card game aspect I was able to learn to play better big bet poker and think like a big bet poker player, that I might not have been able to learn even in the long run, or it probably would have taken at least more time, playing just nlh, that in my opinion is the toughest of these three games though there is much more one can do at PLO because of the action and card game aspect and that's why I like it more than nlh, plus it's not as much a preflop game (there isn't as much book stuffs that one needs, that's also nice) and is not getting too many small cap games in the future I think, or hope as it's then a next to useless game as there are not only less plo games, the winning edges come with the bigger stacks, because of the rake but at the highest levels, the rest being fluctuations, while at nlh, it's soon solved if it already isn't and even bots play cap nlh, and lh.

Where I play, the NL games appear to be soft, generally. I am really trying to make myself WANT to play NLHE, but I generally get SUPER bored when I sit in a 1/2 game to try get experience under my belt. (I currently play a lot of 20/40 and 40/80 LHE, as well as some of the mixed games.) Last time I played NL, I moved in with a straight flush draw, got felted by a big stack, and couldn't bring myself to rebuy because the experience of getting felted in one hand was so nasty--even though the amount of money I lost in that hand was less than one can lose in a big LHE hand!! So I am finding that the transition is a lot harder than I thought it would be, in all honesty. I'm better than break-even on the NL games, but it's just so damn boring, IMO. What gets me most is sitting there watching some kid ponder his decision for many minutes! I just want to stand up out of my chair and scream, "For **** 's sake! JUST CALL!! YOU'RE GETTING THE RIGHT PRICE! (Or fold or whatever--BUT JUST DO SOMETHING because I am not in action in this hand!!) I also think it's kinda lol when some kid gives me the staredown for minute after minute after minute. This guy at a NL table called my all in with A-J (top pair) and lost to my A-Q. It took him about 5 minutes to convince himself I was bluffing. In the middle of the hand, I got my call for the 20 game. I stood up in the middle of the hand and shouted, "Lock it up!" All the other players at the table started laughing when they realized that I was waiting to play a bigger game. The kid with A-J thought that people were laughing at him because I was so obv bluffing, so he called. I took the pot, racked up, and breathed a HUGE sigh of relief to be going to the 20 game. The weekend limit games are still good enough to show a nice profit, but I have to be able to play the softer 2/5 and 5/10 games on the weekdays, so I just have to keep forcing myself to play NL. Which, frankly, sucks.

Still beats getting a real job.