Yeah I know rake is pretty bad. I am trying to supplement my SnGs with some cash games now as well. True it is "only $50" but as a college student, I'm not exactly going to be able to freely redeposit money if I happen to bust.

With past $50 deposits a few years back, I'd play $5 SnG's as well as lower ones and would be able to work up a bit, but that is providing that I can manage to win with only 9 buy-ins or so at $5 SnG's.

Starting with a 10 BI roll and a rough 5% roi playing $5s all the way you are >50% chance to bust before hitting (say) $500

I didn't see the $1.10/45 player turbo sngs mentioned. With $50 it would be hard to go busto with the terrible play in those games. Just google pushbot to get your shoving hands down before playing.

Pretty ez money and the rake is half of the $1.20/9 player games and they take about 45 mins on average.

GL

*sigh* I'm so ashamed right now.

I was at around $48-$52. Normally doing my DoN's, I would do 6-8 tables at a time. I lost just about every DoN, coming in 6th or 7th due to crappy beats or horrible calls. I got angry, and just started throwing my money around. Opened up so more DoN's, a few standard $1 NL SnGs, and a few 45-90 player SnGs. I placed in maybe 2-3 of those, but nothing getting anything close to my BR back up to $50.

I can honestly say this is the first time I ever remember going on tilt and not forcing myself to take even an hour break to cool off. As pretty much everyone has pointed out, the rake at these low level SnG's is pretty much killing me the most right now, besides my tilt episode.

Tomorrow I think I will take the day off, read the 2+2 boards, and re-read my Getting Started in Hold'Em book, as it has a nice section for FL which I plan on focusing on. After I get through that, I'm going to grind out .02/.04FL tables until I can get back to $50 mark. Once I hit the $50 mark again, I might just have to end this topic and open a new one and leave SnG's alone pretty much until I can afford the $5's.

Current BR ~$35.

You have to learn to deal with variance in SNGs man, dont let it get to you. SNGs and especially DoN's are a huge grind. You are not going to win every set you play. Yea you lost 6 or 7 in a row but if you stick through it there will be times where you win 6 or 7 in a row. Its all about long term for DoN's. If you play 1000 with a 5% ROI thats 50 bucks. Your sample size is less than 100 games and 6-7 games losing in a row should be meaningless in the next 900 games or so.

Also, don't start changing games to get back to your initial 50$ because if you so, you are doomed to go broke. Just grind through it and don't have that 50$ starting point in your mind. Playing with that kind of mind set has cost me a lot, so take it from my experience.

They are excellent in many ways and probably the way I would go but I'm not sure they are right for OP.
It's not that hard to go bust even with ~45 buyins and a decent roi (which OP is not sure he has)
These can be quite tilting



If you're going to focus on fixed-limit OP, cash is the way to go imo. In some ways it's simpler than tourneys (you always have enough chips to see a hand through, no bubble/structure factors etc) there's an absolute wedgeload of reading material and decent posters in the microlimit forum, you can quit playing whenever you please and you got a bankroll with some wiggle room even at $35.

Dump your timeframe and your money goal. Getting better at poker is the aim.

If you can, take a deep breath and write off the $35. If you really can't afford to lose it you shouldn't be gambling with it. (I wrote off my first and only deposit as a gambling expense, not even knowing if online poker was beatable but prepared to find out, low expectations ftw) If you're not prepared to lose all of it then get the proportion you are unwilling to lose offline. Treat what you can afford to gamble with as paying for poker lessons up front. It's not really money until you cash it out anyway

Stars has a pretty comprehensive set of tourney and cash game buyin restrictions (Requests->Responsible Gaming) with a 24-hour wait to rescind.

But if you can't find a way to maintain self-control then poker is simply not for you (as an income stream) and if you continue to play you will have bad runs that dwarf this 'one set of DONs.' The only way to avoid them is not to play.

But to play... that's the thing

gl

Yeah not exactly sure I have a decent ROI at the moment. To few games to tell and I don't typically play MTT SnGs.


I think I am going to focus on the cash FL more than SnGs. Today or tomorrow perhaps I will do only FL cash and see how I do compared to my SnG only days, even though it is still an extremely small sample to determine anything.

Never really had a timeframe exactly and the goal was to just keep me motivated. I supposed I should set a lot of mini goals. Maybe getting back to $50 within 2 weeks.

This money is definitely not something I need. It isn't tuition money, rent, food, clothes, etc. If not using it to play poker, chances are it would just go to buying dvds or games.

I think what causes me to get frustrated most right now is not necessarily me losing, but how I lose. I just hate getting my AKs called by someone for half their stack when they have JTo and they bust me. I guess in my mind, losing 1 game to hands like that is much worse than losing 5 games to being outplayed.

Either way, you guys have been a great help to me so far. I'm surprised I even kept my $50 this long compared to when I would deposit $50 say a year ago.

There have been so many suggestions: Stay away from the SnGs because of the high rake, play the 45/90 man SnG's, hit the $5 SnG's and try and comeout ahead. Today I will take my day off and re-read some literature and browse through a bunch of forum posts.

So small as to not be worth doing a winnings comparison in the slightest. Which you prefer, what you saw from your opponents and the like should carry a ton more weight than results. They are massively unreliable.

There are better goals.
'Find my biggest mistake in the last session and work out how much it cost me'
'Find a hand thread with a reply I don't understand and ask the poster to explain it'
'Relate a hand I played to one in a book and see how much I would have to change it to make a different action correct'

It's a mirage.
If their play is poor then by definition you benefit. If nobody was doing this kind of stuff there would be less dead money in the tournament (that's even assuming it was a mistake, there are times I'm calling JTo but meh)
The skill level of the player does not mean he should lose with his JTo more or less than ~65% of the time vs your AKs. But he will lose more than 65% those times you have AA or QTo.
Don't overestimate your opponents or you will end up outplaying yourself

Well the truth is any not-terrible player can beat pretty much any of the micro games. Getting to not-terrible can take a surprising amount of time. Shortening that time is much better than making an extra thirty theoretical cents an hour or whatever now, play what you want as low as you can and get better. Change your goal to 'make this money last as long as I can' (this is not related to your perceived skill level but just expectation-resetting) don't play when you don't feel like it and see what happens.

Great advice!

I always here that argument about how I should love the people that fish as in the long run they are the ones that pay me off. I understand that completely but I guess that also falls into the realm of variance. I still haven't fully overcome the notion that variance isn't always good or bad, it is just something that "is". I can't change whether or not variance happens, all I can do is learn to cope with it.

I will def. change my goals as of right now in terms of not setting monetary goal, but perhaps focusing on how many times I make proper calls or 3-betting if I stick to FL and whatnot. I haven't gotten into the mode of doing session reviews, but I do actually have a number of hands that are marked for review in PokerTracker.

I am spending the day right now re-reading Getting Started in Hold'em. Perhaps I'll try a few FL cash games afterwards, then I am going to be reading Small Stakes Hold'em. At least I can pat myself on the back for putting the time in to cool off and study some more before getting back into it.