After having been pummeled at the end of last week and taken a break, I opened a half dozen just now -- and found fnord in four of them. The days of the easy DN, they're over.

And out of the 13 I was playing, I went 4 and 9. Yay me

Well, busting with QQ<JJ didn't help you much.

Seriously, the competition has changed just in the few weeks I've been looking at these.

imagine what the change has been since november (I used to have a 15% ROI at the 20s and a 12% ROI at the 50s.)

I know, I know. I took some of your equity, fnord's taking some of mine...

Really, it's your own fault for posting about them here.

(Sorry, not rubbing it in -- nothing stays good for long. But it is disappointing, isn't it -- I saw my own results plummet, too, after I'd gotten all excited. I guess I really need to learn cash.)

Well...

On stars, LHE cash games suck. Most (all?) are giant rake fests...

I assume the $16 turbo SNG's are still OK... ?

Yeah, I am about to write these off as not worth the bother. Also, I have determined I am running like ass. Lots of cold decks and suckouts not going the happy way. (May be some bias there). Here's an example: I flop top two with K8, early. I lead and get raised, like 10ish hands in and I have already tagged the raiser as reckless. I push and he calls with KT, giving him 3 outs + runner runner, and he runners a straight bye bye me. I have not done the math to know if I should be dicking around there with top two, but it was so significantly +chip EV and there were so many people left (like everyone) it can't be more than a small error.

I don't know, I wish I had tried these before they toughened up. Now, I think it is too much work to get up to too little return to make it worth my while. I will probably play out to 500ish, or until I get significantly down. My impression at this point is that they suck. Maybe when some of the grinders give up on them they will be playable. Or maybe the non turbos are better since the rake is higher and they take longer (pushing the grinders away).

Oh well, at 500 I won't have any confidence in win rates, but hopefully at least the variance will even out enough to get some idea. 12% at the 50's would be huge. I am playing sets of 13ish, and have more than enough time for all my actions. That would be like, um 150 an hour ish? Unless they take a lot longer than the 20's. Meh, missed another boat.

NLHE cash games are getting bad as well. I cant tell you how many 200nl and 100nl regs that i recognize are playing 50nl now. Not to mention how many Novas i see at my tables that i have zero hands against (virtually impossible they got there by anything but moving down). Lot of moving down going on.

The game is still beatable and i am not the 'sky is falling' type of guy but you cant be honest and say these games arent getting much tougher.

DoNs are really bad for me just because to make a decent amount you have to play a ****load of them and I've always had trouble with that whether it's massively multitabling or putting in long days on any kind of consistent basis.

If you are 5% ROI in the 20s then you are making just over a buck per DoN so if you play for 4 hours then you'd have to play about 25 at a time at one set per hour to make $100 a day on average. Even at the 50s with 5% ROI you'd have to play 10 at a time for 4 sets to make $100. It's a little off because I'm not including the vig but it's close.

I've been playing 2/4 limit which has been working out ok. I actually prefer limit to NL because you can play more hands and there is more action. You don't have the excitement of potentially winning or losing huge chunks of money like you do in NL plus stacking people is awesome but I prefer the faster pace. I 6 table and my goal is to put in 2000 hands a day which is just over 3 hours. If I play 2 BB/100 poker then it works out to $160 per day (plus whatever bonuses) which is pretty great for a side job and puts me in "would be a fine primary job" territory if I can move up and/or put in more hands per day.

Lol the sky must be falling. 200NL is still dead easy to beat for more money than most people make for a month with a lot nicer working hours.
Also Obama talked to some online poker rep today I think, was linked in the Hollywood Draft thread somewhere.

The rake is high but they are still quite beatable IMO. I don't consider myself very good but I feel pretty confident that I'm a winner although I don't have any kind of sample size and I've been running pretty well so maybe that has me overconfident.

The main thing is that it's really easy (at 2/4 at least) to have tables where 2 or 3 guys are bad or 1 guy is completely terrible. I think this part is much better than NL where you are fortunate to get a couple bad players that aren't terrible but maybe call off a little too lightly or let you draw a little too cheaply. At limit they only do it 2 and 4 bucks at a time but there are a lot more guys that just give their money away. As long as you don't get smoked too bad by the regs you're in good shape. Unfortunately because of the high VPP/hand for the stakes there are a lot of grinders going for SN with milestones or even SNE so you are guaranteed to have a regular or two at every 6-max table. The good news is that a lot of them aren't that great but there are a few that play really well and seem to always be in my head.

i dunno - there's a hell of a lot of dead money at the 50NL tables i've been sitting at. I'm not killing the game of MDD type rates (atm i'm not killing the game at all...) but i've been pleasently surprised at how soft the games seem to be atm.

how long do you have to play 50NL a day to make supernova? I saw one the other day at one of my tables.

I agree that the average stats may look better but the average play at 200NL is still bad if you sit at a table with all 20/18s and 15/11s. Most of them are simply TAGfish. A different stye is needed to beat them more efficiently but it's still very profitable.

idk i got there in June i think of last year with a goal of 3k hands a day.

I saw an SNE at some 2/4 limit tables (he got SNE at 3/6 LHE). I think you will see a lot of SN/SNE's moving down because they cannot put in the shear volume they do profitably. A lot of players eventually recognize this, and a lot don't. Some can hack cash game mega tabling and remain viable, but a lot I think cannot. FGators was kind of the pioneer of playing break even poker in massive amounts. (I am not talking really about the STT players because I really don't know much about them, and having played a lot of STT's, the situations are on average much much simpler than in cash games.)

After a lot of thought and experimentation, I have figured out that it is better in general to play fewer tables with an eye to moving up than to play the maximum number of tables you can handle and still remain profitable. I think this is almost universally true for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that you can maintain a comparative advantage as the games get tougher, or rather, just as the games change in any way.

I think the next iteration of poker will be a swing back towards fewer tables because as the general level of play improves, the mega tablers lose comparative advantage and in some ways become the fish to players who can focus more on each individual decision.

How high is 2/4 in NL equivalence?
I don't really table select at all, and at 50NL i'd say a typical table has 2 couple of 30 vpips, who are giving money away quite quickly, say 1 nit, who is giving it away slowly, and a couple of 'tags', which really only means that their preflop mistakes aren't as systematic. Plus there's the odd monkey who pops up now and again looking to donate his stack as fast as possible.

I did some spreadsheet stuff with SNE, 95% for fun because I'm probably the least likely person here who actually plays poker to make SNE because like I said I suck at grinding. Here's a post I made in SSSH with some of the info. It was kind of frustrating because it's one of those thing where you can make a killing just playing breakeven and compared to almost any job it's not that bad, at least in theory.

The typical work day is 8 hours. If you just 6-tabled for 7 hours a day (we'll give an hour for ****ing around although most people working probably have more down time than an hour a day) you'd get in about 4,000 hands per day and 20,000 in a 5-day week, which works out to 2 million a year if you give yourself a 2 week vacation. The VPP/hand at 2/4 is just under .5 so you could get to SNE adding just a few hands here, so let's assume you just made it playing this schedule. If you could earn just 1 BB/100 you would make $80K from the poker and over $110K on bonuses, so you'd make close to 200 grand grinding 2/4. That's a ****load of money and, at least here in Portland, which isn't a bad-off city, there are very few people that work for someone else and make $200K a year. For me personally, grinding like that for a year to make that kind of money and then cutting it down to where I make say 60K a year combined winnings and bonuses would put me in what I would consider an excellent financial situation since that would allow us to pay off our credit-card debt and student loans and put down a big down payment on a house.

Anyway, this got pretty ranty. The point is that when I think about how little I've played and in general how little effort I've put in with the possible payoff from getting any kind of consistent play with a highly attainable win rate I feel like I've wasted the last few years since I've only made mid 4 figures each year. I still enjoy playing poker and most people that play a lot lose, so it's not bad in the hobby context but I certainly could have done a hell of a lot better.

My goal for now is to play 2,000 hands a day at 2/4 and we'll see where that goes. I put 2K in and my plan is to move up when I have 500 big bets for the next level and back down if I drop below 600 bets for the level down, all this after I cash out whatever money at the end of each month. I've had problems in the past with bankroll and I think it will work a lot better this time since I put in 2K instead of what I used to do which is basically just putting in $600 (the max echeck deposit at a time) and playing whatever game for a while, cashing out at least that $600 if I double it up or so and pretty much never having a decent roll. That created a chicken and egg thing where I didn't play consistently because of the bankroll situation and I didn't have the bankroll because I didn't play consistently. I'm still not sure what kind of cashout system to use, I'll probably take most of the winnings out for the first couple months because I feel like I should play more hands and improve before moving up anyway. Plus I think it will be better for my wife if I'm able to take out a decent amount of money the first couple of months.

Wow, that really got TLDR.

It's tough to compare, but I think they're about the same. I would say 2/4 is probably just a bit bigger.

Somebody absolutely crushing the game at 2/4 probably makes about 3 bets per hundred, which is about 12 bucks. Somebody destroying NL50 would probably make about 10 PTBB/100? Not 100% sure but that sounds about right. Anyway, that would be $10 per 100 so it's about the same but a bit less. A typical winner is the same deal. 1.5 BB/100 is doing pretty well at 2/4, and I think the equivalent for NL50 is about 10 blinds/100 (5PTBB/100) which is $1 less per hundred.

In terms of bankroll, I think the variance is higher in limit so 2/4 probably requires a higher bankroll for the same risk of ruin. I don't know what the standard 2+2 bankroll requirement line is these days but it's probably something like 500 big bets for limit and 30-buyins at NL, which would be $2000 at 2/4 limit and $1500 at NL50. I think the thing it's gone up for both and used to be 300 BB for limit and 20 buyins for NL which is about the same for the two games - $1200 for 2/4 lim and $1000 for NL50.

I lost 50 bets last night playing triple draw. I was up until 8am trying to get unstuck. I definitely got a little tilty and at the end of my session the only thing keeping me awake was the timer going off when I was dealt a hand.

I shouldn't be allowed to have a stars account imo. Or I should be allowed to ban myself but only from playing deuce. Tbf I was just running horribly- but there were also a lot of straight up bad plays I made, like 4 betting the turn in an attempt to get a guy to break a hand who was never ever breaking

Poker Stars $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold'em - 6 players - View hand 8910
The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked.com

BTN: $48.95
SB: $33.60
BB: $51.80
UTG: $12.05
MP: $41.50
Hero (CO): $59.65

Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is CO with Q K
2 folds, Hero raises to $2, BTN raises to $6.50, 2 folds, Hero calls $4.50

Flop: ($13.75) A T 8 (2 players)
Hero checks, BTN bets $7.50, Hero raises to $19.50, BTN raises to $42.45 all in, Hero calls $22.95

Turn: ($98.65) J (2 players - 1 is all in)

River: ($98.65) 5 (2 players - 1 is all in)

Final Pot: $98.65
BTN mucks T T
Hero shows Q K (a Royal Flush)
Hero wins $95.65
(Rake: $3.00)


yep thats 2 in a week for #11 lifetime. Im 11 for 11 with them holding too...im due for a big suckout when i have a royal.

MD, a royal flush is the best possible hand. You can't get sucked out on when you have it.

Weird things can happen when you have the nuts
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/54...oldernuts-122/

I failed to get to 2,000 hands today. I usually do two sessions of 1,000 hands, but I didn't play the second for tilt-avoidance purposes. It wasn't a terrible day considering I only finished down 25 big bets, but the path there was pretty awful. If I had more time to take a break in the middle without playing absurdly late I would have done it. Hopefully I can make up the hands this weekend.

Here are a couple graphs from today:





The last 700 hands I dropped $350, about 87 bets and that's including the 15 bet upswing at the end. Those of you that grind probably don't think this is anything, but it's going to take a little while to get used to the swings, as well as the runs where it feels like I'm not hitting anything, they hit everything and I get raised every time I bet and don't have anything.

Fortunately, I'm well bankrolled and can come back tomorrow.

I think the sweet spot for NL is 4-6 tables depending on how good you are with multitabling. Unless you have money spread across sites that's probably also where tables start getting bad if you add more.

I'm absolutely convinced that one could win like 1.5PTBB/100 from only abusing multitabling TAGfish (not the pure nits as you'll never play a hand against them). Of course that's just guesswork but I've taken two days to wade through my DB hands of one MTer that was at all my tables all the time and after that playing with him was like printing money. I'd be surprised if many change up their game at all so you can litterally know that they can never have huge chunks of ranges in certain spots etc.

I'm continuing to run good in 09, should've just switched sites instead of getting a job imo