The Start. The degeneracy. Oh well.

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MadJukes United States. Dec 24 2009 05:44. Posts 372

I was definitely an online poker degen. I admit it. Having to make the transition from live poker (where I'm a pretty regular winner at NL50 and NL100) to online, I crashed and burned several times. I've donked off my bankroll maybe 10 times now. In my opinion, there are several crucial differences between live and online play.

1) The body language. Call it tells, call it reads, but everyone gives off something as they play. How they put their chips in, how long they took to study their cards, whether they're looking at you intently to see if you'll just raise or call, etc. Live poker provides an abundance of information to make your decisions to the point where you can play your opponent and not even your cards. Raise them when you feel they're weak. Online, there are far fewer "tells". (Sure, you can argue timing tells, but everyone will admit that there's less to work with). Therefore, online, you can only play solid fundamental poker to be a winning player.

2) Bankroll management. Being a live player, I'd usually bring 2 or 3 buyins to a table game and leave if I lost it all. Online, if you're playing a stake with 2 or 3 buyins, you're going broke in no time. The variance is much higher (arguably because there's more unknowns).

3) Multitabling. For experienced online 9-max grinders, getting into hands out of position and with marginal hands spells death. In live, position matters just as much, but playing marginal hands can be hugely profitable.

So, being brilliant me, I start playing online poker with at a 4 BI stake, trying to run bluffs and representing hands without having an image, and playing marginal hands and being dominated preflop by the multi-tablers. Easy to say, I lost my first 200 very quickly. Rinse, repeat, being a marginal losing player.

Four days ago, an experienced poker player (and the admin of the school's poker club) set me up with a few starters and rules. Holdem Manager, $20, and multitabling 9-max at ONLY .01/.02 tables on pokerstars.

Cool. Easy. Penny poker.

Except I'd be making more money at ANY job. So after slowly grinding up to $33 at an painful pace, I decide that I'll take a shot at NL25. Cmon, they're not that tough. 20 hands later and a bad beat later, I'm sitting and staring at an empty bankroll yet again.

So now, my personal goal is to start fresh again from $20 and move up the stakes, addressing all the differences I mentioned earlier between live and online. 20 BI before moving up to the higher stake. Dropping when I have less than 20 BI's at my current stake. Playing better hands preflop. Playing in position. Multitabling.

We'll see how it goes! Here's the chart so far, after 4 days...

At around 5k hands, I tried taking my 10-tabling to 18-tabling. Bad leap-- I suddenly found myself with no time to make decisions and couldn't keep track of what was happening with what. Lost like 7 BI's. At the latest stretch, I've been finding myself with QQ vs KK/AA and AK vs KK/AA all-in preflop a lot. Another problem is fishies calling 3-bets with low pocket pair (anywhere between a .20-.30 preflop at a .01/.02 table) and hitting their set and stacking me. x(

I'm about 12 BI away from moving up to NL5! I'm hoping to hit it by the 26th (with no poker on Christmas, obviously). And happy holidays everyone!

Oh and PS: If anyone ever wants to give advice or discuss how I played, any leaks, etc, I'm more than happy to listen and chat.

0 votes

Last edit: 24/12/2009 05:49

dahornnn United Kingdom. Dec 24 2009 06:32. Posts 693

advice = set the maximums stakes limit or whateer on your account to like nl10 or 5 so if you tilt and degen 'i cba its only cents' you can't tilt your hole role in seconds, or well, its ALOT harder to !

phrenik Canada. Dec 24 2009 07:56. Posts 98

Nice work and hopefully you stick with your BR management because it seems like that is what is going to mess you up if anything. I'm playing NL2 right now too and I'm just about to hit the 20 buyins for NL5.

As for QQ/AK preflop, against the loose passive fish getting these in preflop will make you money, although most of the time with AK I'd rather just play a pot and not give a fish a chance to coinflip for my stack. If they have a dominated ace they'll still pay you off if you hit anyways. Of course sometimes fish are going to have AA/KK and there's nothing you can do about that. There are also players I will open fold QQ/AK to or just call to set mine. It seems really really tight, but against players with a vpip of about 10ish or under, if you see them putting a lot of money in preflop they almost always show up with KK/AA like you've noticed. There's really just no reason to pay off people playing that tight, but if you can get the right price these are the perfect people to set mine against.

Now for fishies calling your 3bets with lower pocket pairs and hitting their sets, there's not much you can do. Against a fish I'm almost always going to get it in with an overpair since they will call/shove with top pair or worse. You can try to 3bet bigger to make it mathematically incorrect to set mine (generally you want about 10 to 1 implied odds for set mining) but raising too big might scare the fish off of playing other types of weak hands so it's a tradeoff. Just make sure you don't play a tight passive player the same way you play a fish. Against these players (low vpip/aggression of under 1) you really need to respect their raises, because they will only raise you with huge (overpair/two pair or better type) hands. So against them, sometimes you can fold an overpair to a raise. But honestly, big pocket pairs will win you a ton of money no matter how badly you play them since they win so often. In HEM if you go to the hand groupings report you can see what types of hands are making you the most money. For me, big pairs and pocket aces are the majority of my winnings.

Anyways, keep updating! You seem to be putting in way more hands than I am so it'll be good inspiration for me to stop being lazy and try to keep up.

MadJukes United States. Dec 25 2009 00:03. Posts 372

Thanks for the advice dahornnn. I'm definitely sticking to NL2 until $100, NL5 until $200, NL10 until $500. Hopefully as I'll learn tilt management as I play

Phrenik, thanks for all your input! Your thoughts on set-mining definitely made me reconsider some aspects of play. For example in multi-way pots, I call up to a 5x bb bet preflop with any pair to hit a set now. It's paid off a few times

Where do you play at? (Stars, FT, cake...)