Recently I decided to start playing poker again. Problem was, I cashed out my roll over a year ago and hadn't played since early 2014.



I always felt that if I was still good enough to beat the cash games, then I was good enough to start from zero. So I did.

I played 65 freeroll tournaments, most of them weekly round 1's and 2's on pokerstars and won $4.54 cents. Not exactly a proper bankroll for fixed limit micros. Reassured that I could supplement with freerolls, I began to prepare for the cash games.

First, I recreated all of my hand ranges from scratch. Given some assumptions, I was able to calculate optimal preflop hand ranges for many positions and scenarios, always accounting for expected pot sizes, position, blind structure, and rake among other things. This is not a task I take lightly.

Next I spent several hours in play money games so as to remember that (due to the higher rake) some hands will not be worth playing.

In late November 2015, I returned to the cash games. After 12,000 hands I now have a 500BB bankroll for .02/.04. We have lift off.

Good luck, I have been doing the same for NL and am now almost ready for the jump from 2NL to 5NL ensuring 50 BI at each step.

Thanks bellatrix

Since you have freerolls below and the skill/experience to play much higher, I'd recommend going on the "why Xhad plays short" BRM for a good while. Good luck with this, hope you have a fun ride.

Heres the link to DougL's reference:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/35...-short-473880/

The ev potential of a freeroll is mind boggling to me. I've started with nothing and ran it up with aggressive shot taking on a few occasions so I know it can be done.

Good luck and have fun.

Thanks bob

Last week the British Pound made multi-year lows against the US dollar. Not since the doldrums of the 2008 financial crisis has a Nicker fetched so little in Dollar terms. In the face of this absolute horror, I decided it was a good time to bet on the Pound.

So, I traded my entire bankroll for a handful of quid. This would turn out to be an enormous mistake.

If you're from Europe or the UK, perhaps you too have held a balance in Euros or Pounds. Maybe there's a Canadian or two with CAD balances. You might want to sit up and pay attention. Because last week I got ****ed.

Turns out, PokerStars now (and perhaps always) rounds down on every forex transaction. So if you use auto-rebuy (as I do) and you loose 1 penny USD, you can expect to pay handsomely for the pleasure of having a starting stack. It costs 1 pence for 1 penny. That's over 30% juice.

Over the course of just four days, I managed to pay 150% rake and quietly lost 8% of my bankroll as I was ****ed many hundreds of times due to preferential rounding. Every single time my balance fell below the starting stack I lost twice: once to my opponent, and once to my opponent.

The take away message? Never play on PokerStars with any other currency than US dollars unless you prefer to pay far more than your fair share in rake. Readers be warned.

^^^ why reload it's not NL. Start with 50bb, and reload when you hit 25bb or so. Your almost always above the 12BB limit and even then I don't think in 7 years of play I've 4bet all rounds though in super micro you might.

I think also you might want to rethink the 500BB move up. Your good enough to play short just set some hard rules move down at 150BB or 200BB and up after, and find good games though in super micro you must find the all good.

You need to get to .5/1 soon and move on .. get some rakeback working .. what your end goal and set that also. Good luck and sounds like fun.

@dmyers That would have been a fine solution to reduce costs, and since then I've fallen on the optimal play of converting exact multiples of the exchange rate to avoid paying any fee. But the small advantage I hoped to gain over the next ~3 years by switching from dollars at this time isn't worth that kind of trouble.

Tbh, I wasn't even aware that I had created a problem, and it was a tough one to detect unless I was really watching. So it took a few days to become large enough for that wtf moment to set in.

Here's a new giraffe:

That's a nice graph.

Very nice indeed

How much hands do you play each day
Is it better to play more hands for better results in fixed limit?

Disclaimer: I've played for several years, and even coached for a year with a well known online training site. However, I struggle a lot with play volume, and motivation, and there are just a **** ton of things I don't know.

First and foremost, I have a strong and rigorous methodology for resolving questions and testing my assumptions: the scientific method. At the table I collect evidence in the form of notes, ask questions that are testable and which make predictions about future behavior, and run 'experiments' to learn whether I am correct. If I am not, I start over.

Away from the table I aggregate data using my hand histories (and HM2), simplify my decisions using some assumptions, write equations that allow me to calculate the expected value of my decisions, create hand ranges for which that decision is +EV on the basis of my assumptions, and then observe whether these decisions make more money. If they do not, I start over.

For me, it's best to have high quality practice as often as possible. I do this while I play and during session reviews. So, I never watch movies and rarely listen to any kind of music. I take high quality but simple notes that capture nearly an entire hand and label them for easier referencing. And I use my notes exploitatively.

I guess the most basic assumption I make is this: everyone at the table is making the best decisions they can, given what they know. Given this assumption, our opponents provide evidence for what they know when they make decisions.

Some players think they know whats best and do not change their play. Others change their decisions frequently and may lack confidence in their decisions, but these players are trying to learn through experience. Having low confidence in areas where I have low skill is accurate, and helps me find areas to improve, but unlike many of my opponents this improvement comes from work away from the table. When I know something new that changes me, and I can make better decisions.

I gain the most value by using first principles to carefully understand the most common situations. I find I'm most effective when my efforts to improve are specific, logically consistent, and supported by evidence. The work I do away from the table usually involves a lot of math and some game theory.

# Hands per day = roughly 800 on 1-4 tables, but usually 2.

Great effort -- at the micros how many players to you run into and avoid. Example on your right is a couple of solid players with hand sample of 300+ ... on right is are two fish would you leave a table in this situation or play the fish and ignore the solid players to the right.

I just need the total winrate of the table with me included to be -20 BB/100 or worse. 20 BB/100 is the cost of the rake for the table. This guarantees that, on average it'll be just as profitable as my average table. So I'll play on some number of tables that meet that value.

This means no datamining, otherwise you'll have a reg guy that's a small loser while you're at the table look like a winner because he's not stuck playing with you for most of your sample on him.

Good luck with your run man - building up from the micros is HARD.

I'm doing something similar myself (I stuck it in the "Poker Goals and Challenges" section), and it's been taking a lot of patience.

Thanks JJ

for whats it worth .. I use 50% vpip to judge tables .. 4/6 to 5/6 .. usually that gets me in good. I play US so multi is easier. Just check out position are you better by quite a bit, if not time to move on if you can. Bad to the left is ok but not really the critical information.

Bad to right, then stick around. Adjust when needed. Bad / Tough / you is not the best and really you should leave and micros. You need bad / bad / you ... to stick to a non US table at anything below 2/4 ..

Search those tables and limit the multi table. 2 out of 4 bad tables in multi is not worth the rake. If you 8 tabling or something then your pushing buttons and move on to NL.

Update: I've moved up a few limits and have never gone broke. Simple bankroll discipline. Not playing much but still putting in some hands. The ideas one must learn to succeed in poker are crazy valuable and I still come back to the game to brush up.

Hi there, gl with the progression (capt. Highliner from Stars).

I wouldn't trust graphs like this
I mean LH cant be that simple

Sick burn....

"Either you're the 2nd coming of Girah, or LH is ez."

BR is up a bit. As always, not playing a lot.

Is this the overall graph or the old one with an additional ~10K hands at the end?



Hope it is fun playing again.

old one with additional ~10k.

All hands since starting from zero, less a few rando tournaments.

Yeah it's been fun playing again. I don't have to tell you, poker offers some really valuable ideas. It's a good reminder.