Hey guys

I've recently started playing poker regularly again and I'm playing the 2NL games on poker stars, Is this a good site for 2NL? I try to play at least an hour a day. I've only played around 2500 hands but it seems like whenever im starting to make any profit I go back to break even.

I was using the full ring hand chart recommended by leakbuster as a rough guide for playing but have moved to the a tighter hand chart found on poker proffessor.com. Is the leakbuster hand chart advisable for this level or is it too loose? and is the poker professor chart okay? (It can be found below)

I am playing 4 tables which I seem to manage well but should I lower the number of tables I'm playing(to 2 or 3) if i'm not posting profit?

Also im getting frustrated with the turbulence of my graph(below) do you have any tips to not let it affect your game? And are there any tips to have a more stable win rate?

[img]http://www.*********************/t/e0b98.jpg[/img]

I'm playing ABC poker but im really struggling with my post flop play which is my weakest area are there any guides that focus on this specifically especially at 2NL? I know you have to play ABC and fit or fold poker but my problems occur when I hit TPGK but villain(s) bet in front of me and I struggle to see how strong my hand is in relation to the other players.

What hands are okay to 4 bet all in with pre flop? right now my range is AA,KK but is QQ or AK ok?

Also any advice would be much appreciated
Thanks

Play one table at a time and pay close attention to how each opponent plays. Makes notes for the purpose getting more accurate and useful reads. The time will come (if you insist ) when adding tables will be OK. Probably pretty soon but lets get comfortable with one first.

Read and think through posted hands. Respond to the posts.

Post a hand or two that you played and in which you have a question. (Read the FAQ so you post the hand in the best possible format.)

Get and read a good book on NL Hol 'em. Rinse and repeat.

Play in our forum games (SHANOOBIGANS) they are SnG format so there will be some differences.

Exchange hand histories and reviews with another player and/or exchange Mikago sweats.

More books, more posts, more thought, more practice, more profit.

3000 hands is a very small sample and at this point, it is impossible to say if you are a long term loser or winner at 2NL (just checked. At 3000 hands at 2NL, I had lost 7.5 buy-ins). Poker professor looks fine. On the tight side, I feel but when you start, that's fine. There are no tips to have a stable win rate. If you play long enough, you will have excellent as well as extremely bad runs for several thousand hands.

Regarding your post-flop play, keep playing and studying. Things will fall into place.

When I played 2NL, I was going all-in with AA,KK and sometimes AK. That was it. Little did I know that it wasn't optimal but it didn't prevent me from winning money.

Good luck.

Pokerstars is kind of meh for Micro imo, rake is 5% up to $2 but that'd have to be a $40 pot

http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/room/rake/

If you're looking at rakeback then it's kind of meh as bronzestar 9.6% + stellar rewards

maybe u hit silverstar but that'd be kind of a grind (750VPP at 2NL would be around 22,727 hands) and even then you'd only get around ~14.4% rakeback + stellar rewards)

http://www.fpppro.com/pokerstars-rakeback.php

Think you should rather pick up a site with ~30+% rakeback.

Games are pretty tough at 2NL on PS imo, 5-6 People on every FR table are 10/8/2 or worse, but they're all pretty passive, only very few good people there playing TAG, most are rocks/passive and won't pay you off
the other 2-3 people sitting there are 77/2/3 kind of guys who're passive again but they'll call until they hit 2pair+ and try to stack your TPTK

Ocassionally there are some droolers who stack of with ATC though, but it's kind of rare occasion.


I was playing FR there for 8k hands this month playing something 18/12/2-ish stealing alot from the passive guys and still I made like $4.48 for 2.76bb/100

But maybe it's just that I'm not that skilled I don't know hard to make money there imo.

(payed $10.01 in rake on a sidenote(with proper rakeback I'd slowly grow my roll but the ~14.4% are a joke)

I wouldn't take advice from a self-titled professor who shares a hand chart as a wallpaper-sized BMP

Hand charts are a guideline, not a rule. You should work to understand why it is a good idea to call/raise certain hands in certain positions and situations rather than follow a chart exactly.

Also, that chart you posted is really terrible and I would ignore it. It's probably doing you more harm than good.

2nl is boring the only thing I learned was to not go on tilt... ever. Best thing I ever learned.

+1

Where did the professor get those %'s in the outs chart? Just glanced but several are wrong.

And the systematic preflop guideline / chart is too general to be useful beyond a basic teaching tool. OP you really need to adjust this for reads and table conditions, if you have a tracker and HUD. The starting hand groups seem fine, slightly tight but that's ok for now.

Maybe cut down to just one or two tables until you are consistently beating this level. And everything that Bona and all the other posters said already.

GL

The good news is that if you aren't playing too many tables you will start to learn what kind of hands specific types of players have in certain situations.

Uh... the name is for marketing purposes, and the chart is wallpaper-sized so it can actually be used as wallpaper. I.e. you single-table in the top-left, and see the hand chart on your desktop.

I assume, anyway.

As for the chart itself, I don't see *major* issues with it. But there are some things you should keep in mind:

- When responding to an opening raise, you should consider the position the raiser's sitting in, even if you're not in the blinds. This is especially important when you respond to a re-raise: players who limp in front of you and then re-raise your raise are much different from players who just re-raise after you. These spots can be very read-dependent.

- When you raise a re-raise, playing in the straightforward way suggested, please don't ever fold to a shove. Yes, sometimes your KK will run into AA, but opponent will run KK into your AA too (and possibly much worse).

- It's worth calling small raises with some more hands, but not complete categories. You want to do it with the low pocket pairs and sometimes some suited connectors, basically. The goal is to get aggressive if we make a set (try to get stacks in, because we are very likely to have the best hand) and give up otherwise.

- In "late position" ... you can often be much looser on the button than in the cut-off.

- If you are in early position and someone even earlier than you has raised, re-raising with group B may not be a good idea. But you again may be able to call a lot of small pairs here - depending on the table conditions. On an aggressive table this is a bad idea because we will often get re-raised, and we are in trouble even if we think the re-raiser is bluffing - because we have to worry about the initial raiser's strength, and we're going to pay too much to see a flop when we're only looking for a set.

- As I've vaguely alluded to, much of this depends on postflop play. The chart is overall fairly tight which is a good thing - the less postflop play you do, the less you have to worry about it. But you do have to learn how to do it eventually, and in NL you can lose a lot more with bad postflop play than bad preflop play.

If you're not losing too much just keep playing. Keep reading stickies etc but overall you need to get actual poker in.

Send me a message and we can talk poker a bit,... Id like to do a little project and see if I can get you crushing 2nl

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/17...18/index2.html there´s my graph from last time I played 2nl

Slightly strange hand chart from the Professor. If I've read it correctly, he's saying that if anyone has opened before you, you can only play 88+ AJs+, and you'd only ever play 87s in a multiway limped pot.
I know that there are a lot of limped pots at 2NL, but if I'm on the button, there are an awful lot of hands I can profitably play for a single raise.

Regarding 4-bet shoves, in my experience of 2NL only AA and KK can work out profitably there. It's actually quite rare to see a 3-bet at 2NL except when there is a maniac playing on a Friday night. (Maniacs will shove weak aces and medium pocket pairs). 3-bets at 2NL are heavily weighted in favour of QQ, KK, AA and AKs.

My main advice would be to only play pots when you have position. If you have AJs or AQ in the first 4 seats after the blinds, just open fold. You can fold most hands you have in the blinds too. Too many 2NL players "defend" their blinds with weak hands. Just let the 1c/2c go unless you are in a button vs blind or blind vs blind situation. Wait till you get the button and then you can actually steal the blinds with hands like A4, because you'll have position.

Even when you play really solidly, you will have days where you keep making 2nd best hands (or villain sucks out with a bizarre 2 pr holding) and lose your stack. Just keep making good decisions, and your results should eventually stabilize with a decent winrate.

Yeah that poker professor chart is pretty bad. Use the tight Leak Buster full ring chart. If you want, take out a few hands from the bottom of the range, but this chart is plenty solid enough to give you some ideas of what you should be playing. But remember, charts are just guides.