Scared Money

I've been having some good success (knock on wood) lately playing $10NL full-ring cash games. I can grind out a steady $8-10 per hour if I play 6-7 games at once. I can actually do better than this win rate if I cut down on the number of tables to, say, 3 or 4, but I'm also, strangely, more inconsistent. The Guru calls my 7-table sessions a form of "anti-tilt," in which the action is fast enough that I don't have time to make silly bluffs, let beats affect me, or succumb to FPS (fancy play syndrome). When I'm playing 7 tables at once, I quite literally don't have time to do anything but play solid, ABC poker.... and the results have been pretty damn good.

This morning, for instance, I played a quick 100 hands of $10NL, but I only opened three games. I played very well for the first 75 hands or so, concentrating on each hand closely, and really playing the player. I quickly was up $4 by just capitalizing on good situations, and really playing "poker" against the opp.... but, then I started getting too cute with some reverse steal attempts against one particular opp in one of my games, and I was trying too hard to steal the blinds from some super tight players sitting across from me at another table, etc. In other words, I ended up giving back some of my profits simply because I had time in each game to, essentially, out-think myself and get too fancy. Sigh. I ended up giving back about a $1.50 that I shouldn't have; if I'd been multi-tabling, this probably would not have happened.

The other thing that I seem to be doing right lately (except when I'm not ;-), is playing at the correct limits for my bankroll. I'm pretty much solely playing $10NL, which means that I'm entirely comfortable with the idea of 3-betting opponents when I've got a hand like QQ or AK preflop. I'm also entirely comfortable with getting all the money into the middle with 2-pair or better hands on the flop (if the texture and opp reads dictate, of course), and I'm entirely comfortable semi-bluffing my draws very hard on the flop. Said another way, I'm not playing with scared money, which is allowing me to stay very aggressive.

Ah, scared money. This is a real problem for me in NL games when I venture up too high. I've experimented recently a little with $25NL tables, which really aren't any harder than the $10NL games, but the money is (obviously) deeper. What I've found is that even if I play only 2 games of $25NL at once, I'm playing much more cautiously than I do at the lower stakes. My PFR and AF numbers are significantly lower for my $25NL sessions than for my $10NL, and I attribute this solely to the "scared money" effect. Losing a $10 buy-in in the lower stakes games hurts, but evidently not enough to keep me from being the aggressive winner I am at those games. Losing a $25 buy-in, on the other hand, is psychologically just a little too big for my subconscious mind, which is just another way of saying $25NL is clearly too high for my current bankroll.

In a similar vein, playing at limits that are too small for my 'roll has the opposite effect; i.e., I tend to play a little too aggressive, and am perhaps too willing to get it all into the middle with hands like TPTK or nut-flush draws on the flop. I still make money in the long run at the lower $2NL and $5NL games, but I'm not playing perfect poker.

So, the lesson for me, clearly, is to stay at $10NL unless/until my 'roll grows large enough that I'm no longer playing with scared money. One of the secrets to Perfect Poker, is controlled aggression, which is just another way of saying that you need the psychological ability to shove your entire stack in without regret at a moment's notice if/when the circumstances lead you to believe you have the best of it. My current threshold for playing like this is $10. What's yours?

All-in for now...
-Bug