This is quite a rant thread but am looking for advices at the same time.

This is my 4th straight losing live sessions. Felt like quitting live altogether..

main reasons being:

1) i'm more of a level 1 thinking player. however when i have a legit hands or connected to the board, i can think on level 2/3. More or less, I can bluff properly or making right folds.
example of a hand i posted recently: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/78...-deep-1131077/

Basically, i need to have a legit raising hand to make correct decisions postflop as i'd have a good 'feel' where i am in the hand. I follow a top 20% opening range for online and with multitabling, i won't be card dead..but not the same case for live.

2) Live games are more loose, passive, wild. Often more multiway pots which disencourages bluffing... or don't know when to bluff

3) Tend to 3 barrel HU with air.. pure aggression lol

4) after folding for too many orbits, i tend to open with hands LP that i don't usually play online, get into situations i don't know how to handle..

just dont want to blow this off by just accounting to my luck or running bad..

i did a bit of 3betting with junks last sessions, i got 4bet but when i 3bet with the goods, i take down flop

RAAAAAAH

It happens.

How many hands in total is that?

no idea..

a few ks?

I doubt you put in a few k's of hands if your just referring to your last 4 sessions live...With good dealers and a decent speed game your looking at around 30-35 hands a hour live...whenever you think of it like that in 40 hours you may be seeing only 1200 hands...its not crazy at all to have a bad 1200 hands, im sure I have thousands of though

I made the switch to live right after black friday and also struggled with my play in the beginning...your correct its very loose passive and over time realized how important patience was because of the lack of hands I would raise way too often in LP and get called with hands that are dominating me, and after the hand just think I would never do that online. It's a completely different game so we have to adjust our games. My suggestion...online I'm sure I'm listed as a TAG but am a lot more looser than people would give me credit for...Live I am a TAG, and believe it's the best strategy to beat the smaller games($1/2-1/3-2/5). People don't pay attention and when you open raise 5x bb in EP and they look down at any suited broadway, suited connectors or pckt pairs, and sometimes just unsuited connectors, you can expect to get called...basically the majority of my raises are for value, now and then I get to iso against a loose passive player with a less than premium starting hand(find myself getting to raise for value with a10s/k10s a lot more live because the loose passive players ranges are so wide its worth it and you dominate so much of their range)....or randomly a tight player who is just looking to hit the flop or fold(love those people, fold over 60% of flops and you know where they are at at all times.) 2 barreling is usually gonna be a bad idea, and 3 barreling even worse...I can't tell you how many times I've been called with top pair crap kicker after I raised with a tight image and all the guy could beat was a stone cold bluff, but that's what live players do they find a hand and they go with it, they're not trying to grind but are out to have some fun and if they see a hand they like they're all in, you will see so many of your 3b and 4b shoves result in all ins by medium pocket pairs it will make you cry laughing. Overall I'm actually not impressed by the way I've played live and plan on giving it another crack soon, I hoped to make somewhere around $20/$30 an hour at 1/3nl and for the first few months I did but my play kind of when to crap and I realized it a little too late and after 5 months only was making $14 an hour, now of course that would be over 6BB/100 online and would be great but live players are so bad that maintaining 10/15bb an hour isn't crazy at all and a lot of players can. I hope this was a little helpful sorry for the long post, just hope you don't make the same mistake as I did and let your play go down the drain....variance in live is extremely high because of the lack of hands and the crazy play...but it's worth it in the long run so keep up...gl at the tables

20/hour live? Unless your sessions were incredibly long I don't see how you can do few ks of hands live

A few thousand? Playing live you get like 20-30 hands per hour. You most certainly did not get a few thousand hands in 4 sessions

I'm sure you are multi-tabling online which is giving you the wrong impression. You may have had a winning session, but a number of the tables you played on you actually lost on that table. But the tables you won on compensated and put you up overall. Since you only play one table live your going to have losing session no matter how good you are. Remember poker is one long life time game so you need to keep track of how you are doing over all, not just one night.

Shocked to hear its only abit more than 1k of hands over 4sessions..
Thanks for the long post. i enjoy the read. I see myself in the situations you mentioned , flambo. 3barreling, get called by TPCK and all.

Variance in live.. As my friend also said, you get coolered/sucked out once in a big pot, most likely gonna be stuck for the rest of the session.

Still i think it boils down to one question methinks. Should i wait for value hands Or jOin in the fray? If this is a wrong thinking, lemme know as i have been trying to exploit loose passives and seems to be doing it wrong

If ur losing live because you play like you would play online, you are taking the wong approach. Its simple, if your getting called by a 70 yo man on the flop, hes probably not folding his top pair to a 3barrel. Often live players dont care about losing their buy in, so just dont bluff and value bet thin thats it.

If you're really patient and prepared to occasionally have bad beats (aces cracked by 72), then you can wait around for big pairs and AK. A more profitable way to play is to look for marginal edges.
If everyone at a table is playing - for example - 30% of hands, then you can gain value by playing 20% of hands. By being a little tighter than average, you should win more in the long run, often because of better kickers. If you nitted up and only played 10% of hands against players with 30% VPIP, you're losing some value, because you're folding hands that are outside the top 10% but still in the top 20%, which is a range that beats the villains.
In simple language, you gain a profitable marginal edge by playing a little tighter than everyone else.
Not that this happens in a live game, but if everyone was a nit that only played 10% of their hands, then it would be profitable to play more hands. Your edge would come from stealing blinds and being able to bully the nits on flops they miss.

Just a question about limits? Are you playing at your typical B&M casino or are you getting into something like a 50nl home game?

Good qn home game why?

Edit: i do go to raked games which are NL100 where there are all strangers but that isnt in casino.

Last session was on sunday, a home game NL40

Grunch.

Your sample size is too small. If you get 20-40/hour (closer to 40 with a good dealer + shuffler, 20 with slow table, no shuffler and ****ty dealer), even if you played 10 hours average 30 hands/hr, that's only 1200 hands over 4 sessions.

1200 hands is not a sample size. 1200 hands is a warm-up.

Back in the Full Tilt days, I used to play 1000 hands/hour 4 tabling Rush Poker. In live poker, it will take you an eternity to rake up enough hands to matter, but you get plenty of time in-between hands to get reads (table talk reveals a lot about how players think) so you should be able to establish a pretty good win-rate (Far better than you could attain online). The problem is you just don't get enough hands/hr.

Until you accumulate at least 10k hands live, I wouldn't think about it. Instead, focus on playing each hand optimally and spend time at home going over the hands. If necessary, bring pen/paper or tape recorder (Gus Hansen does this) and note the hands of interest.

Then when you get home, review the hands just like you would an online session.

Once you hit about 10k hands, review your win-rate and how you scored yourself on your hand reviews.