This is funny on multiple levels. Well done.

Good point. He says that in the highly acclaimed series The Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment on Deuces Cracked.

Thanks for the bankroll advice guys. Brag: I just luckboxed a $3K win last night so I might be rolled for $5/10. I'm such a nit though that I won't shot take until I see a soft lineup, and just continue to play my soft $2/5 until that happens. Our $5/10 only runs a few days a week so either way I can only play it 1/2 the time I grind in Michigan anyways.

Notsureifserious, but welcome back.

Still too shy to come back into chat

Avaritia,

Hope all is well with you. Please give me a holler over Skype or whatever just to let me know you have been doing.

Good to see the lady in red. Would love to hear how you're doing.
For serious.

^ +1

Hi all, very serious question here:

Should I quit $2/5?

I've lost about 3500 over about 50 hours, including losing the last 4 sessions in a row.

I know I've been running bad, but I also know I made some mistakes. The value of my mistakes in some spots was just slightly -EV, but the result every time was the full loss. EX: I play a $1000 pot where the EV of my shove (with the losing hand) turned out to be about -$160, but the result was I lost $500 on the hand.

I played 2 large pots where I had 70%+ equity and lost each. Had my hand held up, I'd be down about 2500 total.

I've flopped zero sets and must have seen at least 30 flops with pocket pairs.

Is a 3500 downswing too much to be attributed to variance? Should I move back down to $1/2? FWIW, I can beat $1/2 and my win rate at 1/2 recently has been higher than ever.

I'm still properly rolled for 2/5 and have a stable job.

Kinda hard to say because $3500 really isn't very much. I used to always do a stop loss of $1500, and I often had 2 losing sessions in a row (aka down $3k). Often play bad and run bad go hand in hand but losing $3.5k at 2/5 is not in itself a big deal.

Wouldn't worry too much as long as you are playing well/correctly. So far in 2014 I have a $30.67 an hour winrate over 897 hours at 2/5 at MD Live. I have had 4 downswings over $4000. Pretty much all of the winning regs here have had 10 buy in swings...I think it's fairly "normal".

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700 big blinds is very standard for winning players.

So the fact that you had that down swing essentially says nothing about your game.

The way that you get there is far more important. So try hard to look objectively at the way you play and post hands that you think you might not have played well.

700bb is nothing...that's like two bad days.

can't find any reason to go back to hell. expect up to $5 downswings playing 2/5 100bb cap. play well, gl

50 hours is nothing. But if you're questioning your plays because you're making bad decisions then that's pretty serious. I'd play on, but there's nothing wrong with taking a couple weeks off and studying up rather than grinding. Or if dropping to 1/2 makes you more comfortable then that's could be the right choice to rebuild your confidence. Since it sounds like you still have a BR over $10k I'm very tempted to say that you should play 2/5 for at least a couple more sessions.

My question is geared specifically towards playing on a short roll, i.e 10-15 BI.

I play 1/2 with 2.6k in the roll 2.4k if you don't count the stack on the table. Great table for the most part, already run up 200 into 450 and haven't gotten stacks in just abusing in position. With position on two fish 100bbs deep and a deep stack reg around 400bb and before I know it up to 650 from 200 maybe 4 hours in.

Is it better to take the decent win and pad the roll or should I be going for a big score? I kept thinking back to Caro's words on playing under good conditions.... The deep reg left a few orbits after and another few after that 3 of the tables fish had left so it made the decision pretty easy. But before that I wasn't sure.

WWYD??

Do you have a job?

I'm telling you what I did 20+ years ago when I start in Vegas. I had $6000 on my name and a good car. That was all I got. I had to live, pay rent and pay whatever little bills I had at that time. Now, don't forget that in order to make a decent profit just to survive I had to play every day in the small $1/2 NL Downtown where during the week all the best NL locals were. Weekends have been my bread and butter (3 days). So, how much is that? - 30 buy-ins.

It depends how you play the game. If you are the type of dude that likes to play big pots after the flop, the variance is extremely high, due solely to the big pots. Tight play does not provide a solution to this problem, although it somewhat tones it down. The obvious answer is a big enough bankroll. Do not adopt any strategies designed to reduce variance! Treat your bankroll as funny money. Have enough to withstand challenges of fate. Do not spend the winnings to early in your career.

Variance goes thru the roof when you start building big pots. Swelled pots are a source of nightmare and frustration. For a drunken tourist with a miniskirt Vegas chick hanging on his shoulder, this is fun. For a pro with a modest bankroll, big pots are toying with death. You can see traces of sweat on his forehead and upper lip. It's a nightmare.

But so what. If you have a bankroll, you should ram & jam on the flop and after. Yes, the skill factor goes way down postflop after you decide to play a big pot, but you are having way the best of it by now. Jamming is profitable.

After a while, if the game is good to you, buy yourself something out of the bankroll. A shiny gambler's watch, maybe a $10K Rolex. A little token of pride. A mark of achievement. You will feel good about yourself, that's never a bad thing to do.

confused...skill factor rises postflop and subsequent streets, this is where you can force your Vs to make bigger, more lucrative mistakes, obviously as the hero you can make significantly more impactful mistakes as well.


anyways, if you feel like "this is too much $ on table" you will undoubtedly play sub-par so better to get up, however if you excel at deeper play and see opportunity at the table still, it can set you up for big scores and give you a greater arsenal of moves at that table.

Keep playing.

Rolled is really all you need. I'd say always take the high variance route if it means a higher EV, never care about downswings, never care about suckouts, etc. It's just that all of those are built on a foundation of being properly rolled. You'll care a lot if you're shot-taking and/or under-rolled. But if you have the $, just keep playing.

The skill factor goes down because the stack to pot ratio is lower making decisions less complicated. For example you're stacking AA pretty much on any flop when the SPR is < 1 but when the SPR is 15 you've got decisions.

And how thick your roll is depends on how easily you can redeposit if you run bad. I have a very thin roll that I can add to easily so I'd rather invest my winnings rather than keep them locked up in my roll.

A) Congrats on making the $5K. Doesn't matter if it took you 290 hours or 2900 hours. You are showing a profit and that is something to be proud of. That's $17 per hour, which isn't great ($30/hr is; $20+ hr. is probably what you should be striving for, but you have to play the style that is most comfortable for you right now; that might mean $17/hr is the max you can attain).

B) I like what the poster above says and I also do that. Just collect the $100s you cash out for and use the rest for expenses, fun, etc. If you want to balance it out and you lose, say, $430 in a night, take $30 from the life roll and put it into the poker roll ... and so on.

you should stay. it's not like you have 50 percent of your roll on the table. you have 1/13 of your buyins plus some profit.

Don't think about it until you have 1/4 of your BR on the table, and don't worry about it until you have 1/3 your BR on the table. But these considerations should only come into play if you are likely to get into pots where your entire stack is in jeopardy, meaning everyone has you covered. Since the fish only have the 100bb you buy in for it shouldn't be an issue, unless getting into pots with the reg is completely unavoidable.

Also, how good is that game compared to the average game you play in? The more likely you are to find a similar game tomorrow the more likely you should be to leave.

point taken, though only in the context of a pot that was inflated pre...