I play a couple of 1/2NL home games. I am a winner. I was losing/break even for a while. It's a group of guys I grew up with, co-workers and new friends. The game is serious and plays bigger than a casino 1/2 game. Unlimited Buyins.

I started focusing more on my game and less on the fun at the table. Now I am a regular winner. I visit this site a little and I study different materials. My play improves, then I hit a wall. What I have been trying to do has been working, so I back off studying as much. Then when I try to get back into the flow by restudying the same things that helped me the most, they seem dull. They do not ring that same bell that excited me the first time I studied it.

I already know what has been working for me, but I like to get creative and shove pre with a pair duces. WTF! It's not really that bad. Maybe I have decided not to go past the flop unless I have a certain holding or just not to play a certain player with less than the top of my range. Then playing, I'll decide to gamble and play out of line. These are plays that can backfire a couple of times a night and I end up having a tiny winning session or a small losing one.

Ideas??

Almost every regular poker player has some level of a gambling itch. Some players will admit it. Many won't. They'll tell you the love the competition, the intellectual challenge, being with others, winning or some sort of other bs. It is about putting money at risk and the natural high you get from doing so. If you don't believe me, propose at your next game that you play for toothpicks instead of money. See how long that game lasts.

Once you acknowledge that you that the gambling itch is in you, you have to decide what is most important to you in poker. Nominally, most poker players will tell you it is about winning money. The reality is the gambling itch have them playing too many hands pf. They'll shove with 22. That's where you are today. Winning poker is boring. It involves a lot of folding. You have to decide what is more important to you. The thing is the gambling itch gets worse the more you scratch it. Over time, pots that used to excite you will become boring. The easiest path will be to put more at risk to get the same high. Eventually, that poker player will bust out and scramble to get money to play. And things get worse from there.

Good luck, but the odds are strongly against you.

The above post by Venice is right on the money. One thing I can suggest is possibly the stakes feel a bit small to you now and if you live near a casino with poker perhaps try moving up in stakes to 2-5 or 5-10 for a bit more of a challenge?

Mental game. Tommy Angelo's elements of poker helped me. Learning to enjoy watching everyone else play and thinking about their hands helps with the fold boredom too.

Playing in crazy home games or wanting to win money really badly make it pretty tough to play good poker. Many can't keep their cool. Home games are especially tough for me. Slow dealing and nonsense play getting rewarded is very tilting for me.

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Sometimes there just is no getting better. I mean, as with any skill, if the aptitude is there you can improve quickly but each new level is harder to achieve than the last anyway. With poker, the vast majority cannot even progress to being able to be a winning player at the lowest level of the game, then there are some that are built to crush bc they're bigger, faster, smarter than 90% of the player pool.

The most important thing in poker is to understand your place, and identify what you can/cannot do to improve your ability to win (more). I'll add most people are capped and don't realize it, that's where edge comes from. No one is equal and most just have no clue where they stand. Everything else is noise.

Please don't do this. You need to learn to control your itch to gamble not inflate the stakes while you still lack control. The poster is correct in that it will work as a short term fix but it is long term dangerous to learn the lesson that when your current stakes don't provide enough thrill just increase them. YMMV

It's not gambling if you win.

Thanks. I plan to roll that around in my mind a little, you said a lot with a few words. "Winning poker is boring. It involves a lot of folding." I have begun to reach the point where my play is different and players kinda try talking about it to induce me to play more hands. Sometimes I can just sit there and play my game. Another time I start playing looser hands too many times. Even after I see it, it is not easy to stop. "Come on baby, 22 for it all!"


I didn't actually shove w/22. I used that to overstate what I meant.

Winning poker is boring but you aren't alone in that there is a whole meta game around private games and home games. Depending on how friendly vs competitive it is you might want to loosen up.

It's rude for people to tell you how to play, but it's also rude to be salty nit that doesn't add to the fun. I'm not making assumptions about how you behave, just noting that I see that happen in private games and it's a big facepalm.

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I get it. I'm not that tight. I mix it up. I start most sessions really loose. Then back off to my range. I win playing this way early. I do struggle with changing gears and going back to my loose play style I play to start the games. Reason being, I start SS 100-150bb. If I run it up to 300bb or add enough to have 250-300bb I'm tighter. I'm not willing to be as aggressive after my stack has doubled+. Start 100-150bb, slinging it. Then @300bb+, little less willing to shove it. If I'm down 150-200bb, even less willing to force villain to stack off or fold.

Hey, got some holes in my game.

consistently challenge your skills and thought process at the table

This is ‘get better’ advice that reaches far beyond poker but absolutely applies here:

Everything you do should have a purpose.

If you’re raising, why? Calling, why? Are you value betting, denying equity, stone bluffing?

Very simply if you know why you’re doing what you’re doing, every action, you’ll win more in poker.

It sounds super simple but it’s pure gold for crunching life. And poker.

Your problem is that a winning game against these players has become automatic, so you're looking for other things to entertain yourself. Of course, if you try to do trickier plays that you might have read about, against players who play ABC, then your win rate will go down due to Fancy Play Syndrome. You always want to be only one level ahead of your opponents, not two or more.

So what can you do? Find some aspect of the game that is hard for you, that takes mental energy, and work on that relentlessly. I have recently moved up from 1/2 to 2/5 games (this is in Texas, so assume a straddle most hands), and I find that the 1/2 games have become 'boring' and I start getting out of line if I don't find something challenging.

Right now, when I'm playing 1/2 waiting for a 2/5 seat to open up, I'm working on keeping track of how much is in the pot at all times. This is hard for me because I used to play a fair bit online, where the computer tells you any time you're interested. I'm definitely getting better at it, but it isn't automatic, yet. I think that it will be in a few more sessions of focusing on it, and I think that will inform my play significantly as I use the skill in the higher games.

Another thing I have worked on in the past is to work harder at reading what people are holding. When I'm not in the hand, I'm still working every player's range and trying to guess what they have. It's frustrating if they don't reach a showdown, or if one player mucks after seeing the other, so I don't get to confirm my guess, but I get enough information that the practice is valuable and my hand reading skills are improving.

I've had other nights when I focus on picking up live reads. I deeply suck at this and it bothers me that I almost never catch anything. On the other hand, more and more I find that I know this player is on a draw, or that one has a pair but isn't very proud of his kicker. I usually can't tell you what made me think that, but it's usually right, so I must be learning something.

If you want to improve your poker skills, find a different game, preferably in a public room. I used to play in a state that was a long way from casino poker. I killed. It was so easy I thought I was a poker God. But it wasn't that I was so good, it was that everyone else was so bad, or drunk.

It's like being the star athlete in your kindergarten. That doesn't mean your going to be even passibly good in high-school or college.

Once I moved to a state that had
Cardrooms, I had to completely re-engineer my game, read books, study, and it took a few years to get my hourly rate back up to something decent and it has never returned to the level of the glory years of home poker.

Changing your game, at least for me, was painful and filled with losses. I'm not saying my game is great even now, but I've learned so much and play WAY better than when I first left home games.

This is some good advice.