You played this hand horribly, that's not bad luck.

52/26 isn't enough stats/reads to be sure, but that hand is probably played fine. If all I knew about the villain was 52/26, then I may play it the same way. The 3bet should maybe be bigger and maybe the flop bet too though. I may also just call pre-flop if I didn't know how he reacted to 3bets.


But I've seen a lot of people do this. Focus completely on hands like that and not pay any attention to tons of other situations where they are playing badly.

Think hero played that hand badly. The only hand he's beating is AJ and only a complete idiot SB would reraise flop with AJ there.

Also OP, even if we give him all Ax heart combos and assume he 4bets AK pre, and he's a moron who will do this with AJ too:

TT,88,AQs,AhJh,AhTh,Ah9h,Ah8h,Ah7h,Ah6h,Ah5h,Ah4h, Ah3h,Ah2h,AQo-ATo 57.78%

AcQd 42.22%

You shouldn't therefore be that surprised that when the money went in when you were behind, especially as he checkraised the preflop 3bettor on an ace high board.

Also, you realise even a random Axhh hand with no second pair has 45% equity on you?

Ah5h 45.45%

AcQd 54.55%

Hardly bad luck, you got the money in in a situation where if you're ahead you're slightly ahead, but if you're behind you're a massive dog.

vs. 56/26 I think it's OK but we're still going to lose the hand a good chunk of the time. Not like this guy won't call 3bets with A8ss/AT/88/TT.

If this is proof of having 'no luck', it's piss poor. Seems OP thinks he can stack off with TP2K and expect to win 100% of the time, like no-one at 10NL thought of a way to beat that strategy.

extra-cranial cerebrovascular system, cranioplasty, endoscopic endonasal surgery, intracerebral hemorrhage, ventricular endoscopy

There, I think I'm ready to start operating on people's brains now.

Funny how you're willing to criticize others yet offer nothing useful yourself.

This +1

If you're not going to listen to the advice in this thread and you're only not a winning player because of the bad beats you get quit. i'll help you with this just email every poker site you're registered with and request your account be closed and post here: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/55...ghlight=ban+me and be removed from 2+2.

Or... You can grow up realize you have huge leaks in your game and that you shouldn't even be playing 10nl when you can't beat 2nl. Also if you play on stars in the responsible gaming section there's an option to enable buy-in restrictions to your account so you can't play above a certain stake, this wont help get over your tilt but may help prevent some losses.

Strict bankroll management. Never buy in for more than 5% of your bankroll. You will either end up winning and moving up, being around break even, or losing at a much slower rate than if you were depositing over and over, which are all better than playing with 100% of your roll all the time.

The problem is really the rake at low stakes. It makes the games very difficult to beat, so even if you are breaking even, that's an accomplishment. I'm from the US and played on Full Tilt way back in the day (2006-2007). I'd play SNG's and check out all my opponent's graphs on sharkscope. At a 9 handed table, there would generally be 1-3 winning players and the rest were losers. It's just the way it goes.

Don't feel bad though, people say Phil Ivey is the best poker player and he's lost $4,500,000 online in the last 2 years.

errrrrr, no reads btw

You can probably just let it go on the flop, tbh. He bet pot, these are almost never bluffs.

you're really not helping your cause..

I did question his donk into me, but this is 10nl it can mean anything, thought i'd peel see if he slowed down and then i hit a set. Am i ever folding turn?

I don't care about the cause, i'm looking for help

Can't see myself ever folding the turn, no, but I'm not high-fiving the monitor. We probably have the better end of a coinflip against his likely range, which is going to include smaller sets, some 2 pair, 87, and flushes, and maybe the occasional Ace with a big spade. I would not be putting top set in his range though.

No need to post hands in this thread seeking validation. This is not a blog. One thread will not magically make u better at poker so u don't lose.

Suck it up, embrace the fact youll have leaks yada yada yada

OP: *HH*
2+2: fold flop
OP: nope

LOL, OK then. Play like you want and carry on whining about being 'unlucky'.

BTW yeah I'm calling that turn* vs. an unknown but again you have to expect to be beat a good chunk of the time. Both of these hands are situations where one calls and says 'yep standard' when you're behind.

* except not because I folded flop

So you had no plan? He donks out pot, what is your plan? 'Ill call and see' is not a valid answer. HALF the deck is a scare card for you. Are you going to be happy to see a spade? J/Q/K make you happy? When he has Ax you are drawing to two outs. 6, and the one card that you want to see on the turn complete the OESD. For ****s sake, you are IN POSITION. USE IT. Fold flop. Move on to the next hand.

You aren't God's gift to poker, you need to work hard like everyone else. Work on your attitude before you work on your game because you don't stand a chance otherwise.

easy fold on the flop. and no i didn't just look at results, i just knew after you got checkraised, it's a really easy fold - SB isn't doing that with worse than AK or a big combo draw.

Atleast donate the money to me

OP, you need to change your avatar to read You played both hands in a manner consistent with your current, ridiculous avatar. You played as if you truly believed success was your only option - that it was impossible that villain had a better hand than you. In both hands, villain was actually ahead.

What's worse, not only was it possible that villain was ahead, it was probable. In the second hand, that misplaced belief in invincibility caused you to lose $7.60 instead of $0.40, or at worst $1.30. When villain donks pot, almost always he's got {an A, a set, two pair, 87}. A select few might add another flush or straight draw. No, I wouldn't put him on AA either, but it doesn't matter. You are behind most of his range on the flop, and drawing to two outs. When the T comes on the turn, you shouldn't be fist pumping - you should realize that all of the hands that weren't ahead of you before the turn just moved ahead of you now. Either he was ahead on the flop, and you should have folded then, or you made a correct read to call, but now he's ahead on the turn, you have one out, and you should fold now.

So problem one is you are lousy at ranging villains.

Problem two is you don't give villains credit, either for cards when they bet, or for having skill at least as good as your own.

Problem three is you don't know what you don't know. You're so ignorant* that you think you're good. Grow a bit of humility and realize that you haven't yet learned to properly apply the concepts you've heard about.

* I'm using the term in its literal sense, not (just) as a pejorative.

Why are you playing 10NL? You say you always lose. If you can't even beat 2NL, you should not be playing 10NL. It seems your overinflated self-image is causing you to play at stakes beyond your abilities.

And that gets us to problem four - the self-diagnosed BRM problem brought on, you say, by tilt in the face of bad beats. You say you tilt and move up stakes, only to take more bad beats which wipe you out. There are several aspects to this.

First of all, neither of the hands you posted was a bad beat. Both were cases of you failing to give villains credit, and pushing what, in the circumstances, was a weak hand way too far.

Second, you say you get far more than your share of bad beats. The evidence you have presented doesn't support this view, but so what? Let's accept the premise that you do get more than your fair share of bad beats. That's not an entirely unreasonable position. After all, nearly half of all players get more than their fair share of bad beats.

Third, is your reaction to losing, by bad beat or otherwise. Variance happens. Live with it. When you accept that bad beats will happen, and there is a near even chance they will happen to you more often than your fair share, all that is left is responding appropriately.

Winning players get bad beats too. Winning players who get their fair share of bad beats, or less than their share, don't need to worry. They just net a positive return. Winning players who get more than their fair share of bad beats have a tool available to them to reduce the suffering from bad beats: they can buy bad beat insurance. This pays protection on their bankroll when they get more than their fair share of bad beats. Why don't you just buy bad beat insurance?

Perhaps you don't know where to buy bad beat insurance or didn't even know it existed. That's understandable. It usually goes by another name - its trademark name: Bankroll Management^TM, or the TLA BRM^TM. Properly using BRM^TM keeps about 99% of winning players who buy it from going bust.

BRM^TM consists of four simple components:

1. Don't consistently play at stakes you aren't beating.
2. Have a big enough bankroll for the stakes you are playing and beating.
3. When you lose too many sessions, move down in stakes.
4. When you are winning, don't leave too much money in play at one time.

There's a catch, though. Genuine BRM^TM is only available to winning players. Beware of cheap imitations like "20BIs should be good enough when you are trying to move up at the micros".

Clearly, you haven't bought the genuine article. You are doing the opposite of at least three of the core concepts:

1. Quote:

   Originally Posted by tasttyyy

   I just constantly lose money playing poker
   You are consistently playing at stakes you aren't beating.
2. Quote:

   Originally Posted by tasttyyy

   I deposited £240 2 days ago
   At current exchange rates, £240 is worth about $375 after conversion fees. For average winning players, that's not enough bankroll to play 10NL safely.
3. Quote:

   Originally Posted by tasttyyy

   i get a bad beat in 10nl and move up in stakes to like 50nl.
   When you lose, you are supposed to move down in stakes.

Perhaps most troubling is your refusal to accept responsibility for the mess you are in. Not just this: (No it doesn't just happen, you choose to make it happen), but also your insistence on your losses being due to bad beats when all you have shown us in this thread is bad play on your part.

If you truly cannot stop yourself from moving up when on tilt, then you've got a gambling problem, and you should contact all the sites you might ever play on and have them ban you. Otherwise, just don't do it. When you are feeling tilted don't play at all. Remember that the proper response to losses is to move down in stakes.

The way you make money at poker is by following proper BRM while playing better poker than your opponents. Playing better than your opponents requires you to either

• find sites/stakes where most opponents are not only really terrible (not easy to do these days) but are actually worse than you currently are, or
• to learn to play better than them.

Learning requires lots of practice. Until you have learned enough, that involves losing lots of BIs. So the best place to learn is at the lowest stakes. Your money will buy more learning. Focusing on winning money is backwards. Focus on learning how to make the best decisions. Until you become good enough, you will lose money learning this. So in order to win money you have to be prepared to start by losing money.

I don't think you are ready for coaching. I see your asking about coaching as another way you dodge responsibility for your results. You have to do the work to make yourself a fundamentally winning poker player, not have somebody wave a magic wand over you. When you are regularly beating 50NL, perhaps a coach can hep you further improve.

That's not strict bankroll management. Strict would be never buying in for more than 2% of your bankroll, and never playing with more than 5% of your bankroll on the table. Even that wouldn't be strict enough for a pro.

What iPUTnutsONtheTABLE suggests isn't bad advice for a solid winning player trying to move up the micros while being willing to fail, but we have no evidence that OP is such a rare item.

My suggestion to OP, if he's serious about becoming a winning player, and if he can control his tilt, is this:

• Start by accepting you're currently a losing player, and should continue to regard yourself as a losing player until you have consistent results that prove otherwise.
• Accept that you are responsible for your future results.
• Commit to doing the hard work and practice to improve to becoming a winning player.
• Buy and use a HUD/database. (Evaluate both for free first.)
• Deposit about £130. That should be about a 100BI training budget at 2NL ($200).
• Play 2NL, while assuming each of your opponents is better than you until you have absolute proof it isn't the case.
• Review hands, with an eye to finding out what you did wrong, not what your opponent did to suck out on you.
• Catalog your consistent mistakes, and fix them.
• When you aren't sure what you did wrong, post hands here. When posting, include reads and thought processes.
• If you go bust, reload another 100 2NL buyins and repeat.
• If you build your bankroll to $300, perhaps you are a winning player at 2NL. Move up to 5NL. Play until your bankroll reaches $200 or $500. Move down to 2NL or up to 10NL accordingly. At 10NL, play until you reach $300 or $1000. Etc.

Finally, I'm serious about changing your motto. If you don't like my first suggestion, try

I don't think you need to stay at 10nl until your bankroll is $1000 tbf.

Then again OP sounds like the kinda guy who could have 10,000 buyins and he'd still go busto in the end from tilt spews and been unwilling to learn.

"It just happens"

?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

No, earthquakes, "just happen". Ebola "just happens".

Take some ownerships and responsibility for your actions.

The reason you keep busting out is because you are a tilt monkey. And as long as you're willing to lie to yourself and pretend that you have no responsibility for your own actions nothing is ever going to change and you'll continue to be just another whiner who can't hack the game.

Grow up. Stop tilting. And then learn to play better poker.

Since you're playing on PokerStars what you need to do right now is open up the client and go to:

Requests -> Responsible Gaming -> Restrict Table Limit

Now set it so you can play a maximum of 5NL.

Requests -> Responsible Gaming -> Restrict Tournament Limit

Now set it so you can't play a maximum of $2 tournaments.

This is something simple you can do right now to prevent it from "just happening".

When you don't, we will all know how completely full of **** you really are.

I suggested 100BI @ 2NL, 60BI @ 5NL, 50BI @ 10NL and 40BI @ 25NL.

You will note that those numbers were for this OP specifically. They were not general advice. In fact for a competent winning player trying to move up fast, I was OK with the 20 BIs that were suggested upthread.

For this OP, I'd be pretty firm about the 100BI training budget and the 60 BI req for moving up to 5NL. This latter because 60BI for 5NL is only a 50% increase in his starting roll, which might be possible to acheive without actually being a solid winning player. If OP showed solid achievement at the first two levels, I'd be OK with 40BI @ 10NL and 20-25BI @ 25NL.

Why do you think this OP shouldn't need 40BI @ 25NL?

Ah, thought it was general advice.

Your posts are like the flower of amorphophallus titanum.