So this was my first day trying to play poker and not just grinding it out and it was a very giving experience. I played 3hours a iPoker NL400 6max on only 3tables and I was trying really hard to model my opponents and crushing them. This however proven to be much harder then i though. I did not really know what to look for and that was when i realized how much i suck at poker and how much everyone else sucks since I probably represent the majority of NL400 grinders out there making a living of NL400 but not able to move up past NL400.
What have i learn today:
The big thing i realized today is how many "professional poker players" there are that is just breaking even or at around 1pt/bb over 200k hands. Last year you could find an edge by playing ABC and watching some cardrunners movies to be up to dat with the trend (before leggo came
), i feel this is no longer the case. Sure you can do this only playing peek time and paying extremely good attention to table selection and this is what most people do without maybe understanding how important it is for there win rate. Then when they find them self sitting at a table with only regulars they do not quit for various reasons. They just sit there and shuffle chips around playing about the same style as anyone else waiting for setup hand that go there way and whine about setup hands that dont. One day they have more setups and make money next day they have setups against them and loose money. Think of it this way, every hand you win/loose put your self in the other guys seat and try to see if you would have won/lost more/less and if the answer is no that is hand that should not be included in you win rate since the EV is neutral. This is the case with the majority of big pots that go on between regulars. So then what it comes down to is all those small pots where you can value bet a bit thinner then your opponent or steeling uncontested pots and after you have done this for 40pots you finally gets a bad beat and you tilt and loose a big pot witch makes all the hard work in the small pots disappear. This makes you think about variance. Variance i a big reason poker is such a big game. Lots of people can make money for a quite big sample size. When i read people saying 60k hands would mean anything that is just crazy. I would say that there is no such thing as win rate. Looking at a graph of your win rate tells you nothing about how good of a poker player you are right now. All it say is how good you were at beating the games in the past. And then we have to discount for variance witch we in no way can say anything about. I would say you need 200K hand to see if you have been a wining player in the past and the more hand the more it proves you are a winning player. Not because of the fact that variance evens out over a large sample but because it shows you have the right drive to constantly improve and adopt to new conditions. This is what a very large sample since can say.
So what i realized today really trying to find leaks with other players is how small of a edge poker really is and how extremely important self control is. This is well known and everyone will say so if you ask them what is important about poker but really understanding it is harder, i think i came some what closer that truth today.
From a less philosophical perspective i also realized how hard it is to actually find the leaks and how to exploit them to the maximum. The good thing however was that i realized what an sick edge you will have on a level like NL400 if you make an effort to improve since i could find tons of obv tells like bet sizing in 3bets and so on. Most regulars don't realize how much information they are giving away with bet sizing. My guess is that they assume no one pays enoff attention since they don't do. For instance some people always bet sums like 22 33 44 122 when the were value betting and then they bet 19 29 38 129 when they were bluffing. This is so obv that it is ridiculous but it so common and i have never really put enough attention to my opponents to realize this before. It was this that made me understand how many other leaks there most be with there games that im not able to spot since im an untrained eye.
However it was really tiering to pay this much attention to the game so i understand why most people dont bother. People who go after a poker life often do it with the illusion of easy money and they dont want to get down a dirty. They read about everyone making it so they grind it out waiting for that big upswing to come so they can move up in limit just to loose it all back. Poker is not an easy game and the people you read about are 10times harder workers then any factory worker, engineer, doctor and so on.
What have i done to get better:
Well after realizing that starting work harder to improve is going to be worth the effort i am going to do some little ting every day to improve my game.
Today that was starting to read Professional No Limit Hold'em which is one of the few poker book actually worth reading.
I also mailed BobboFitos trying to buy his book but unfortunately that man seems impossible to get a hold on so we will see what happens there.
Well that all for today. Now im going to have a break of 3day from playing. Breaks can be more +EV then playing and probably are most of the time
I am going to read the whole Professional No Limit Hold'em book during thees 3days so i will have my hands full.
Man! I think i have never written so much in english ever in my life ^^
