- Mark Twain
Substitute the words "play poker" for "invest in stocks" in Mark Twain's famous quote and you begin to understand the pitfalls of playing poker for a steady profit, month after month. You simply cannot let your guard down for even one short session... or you risk losing some or all of your hard earned profit for that month. You face danger every time you sit down to play, so the name of the game has to be Focus.
With that in mind, I have begun this month of October by vowing to play a max of just two games of Rush at any given time. The main reason for this approach is that I'm now playing $25NL full time, and the players at these stakes are just plain and simply better than those at the $10NL stakes. Not a ton better, mind you, but certainly savvier overall in a way that means my game also has to adjust. And to adjust you have to pay attention. And to pay attention, you have to slow the game down to speed that allows deeper thought for each hand in question. And, for me, that means two games at once, max.
The good news is that the first three days of the month have seen my bankroll grow by $120. Two thirds of those bucks came from no limit cash games, where I played a tad over 1700 hands of $25NL, both full ring and 6max. In both formats, I've been working on tightening up my opening range, including my stealing ranges. The goal is to make each hand that I'm involved with (relatively) easy to play post flop (if it goes that far). Why make life hard with marginal cards when I can wait for better opportunities and better cards? This is a key difference between tournaments and cash. In the former, the escalating blinds don't allow you to simply wait for good situations to come around. In the latter, you can generally afford to wait longer, as the blinds are fixed at a relatively low amount.
My VPIP thus far over 1700 cash hands has been a fairly tight 13.3 in the FR games, and 17.7 in the 6max. I'm also working on closing the gap between my VPIP and PFR stats. In the full ring games, my PFR so far is 11, and in the 6max games I'm up to 15.9%. Tightening up my VPIP, and reducing the VPIP-to-PFR gap has been surprisingly hard for me to do from a mental point of view, but it's also definitely been profitable. Whenever I think about cold-calling, I am trying to force myself to also add the internal question, "hey, if this is good enough to call with, then why don't I raise with it instead?" Playing aggressively like this keeps the pressure on the villains, putting them to hard decisions, plus it helps define their ranges when they either call my 3bets or RR me. Raising is a powerful tool... but of course the trick is knowing when to back off when it doesn't achieve the desired result.
My VPIP thus far over 1700 cash hands has been a fairly tight 13.3 in the FR games, and 17.7 in the 6max. I'm also working on closing the gap between my VPIP and PFR stats. In the full ring games, my PFR so far is 11, and in the 6max games I'm up to 15.9%. Tightening up my VPIP, and reducing the VPIP-to-PFR gap has been surprisingly hard for me to do from a mental point of view, but it's also definitely been profitable. Whenever I think about cold-calling, I am trying to force myself to also add the internal question, "hey, if this is good enough to call with, then why don't I raise with it instead?" Playing aggressively like this keeps the pressure on the villains, putting them to hard decisions, plus it helps define their ranges when they either call my 3bets or RR me. Raising is a powerful tool... but of course the trick is knowing when to back off when it doesn't achieve the desired result.
The other $40 in profit I've made in these first three days of the month came from a win in a multi-table tournament. I played a total of three MTTs so far. Two of them were 135-man $4.40 Rush tournaments, and I died early in both. The third was a 54-man $2.70 "super turbo" that I took first place in. In this one, I basically played super tight and just waited for some early reasonable opportunities to shove (i.e., late position, big cards, weak players to my left) and then got it in whenever I could until I was up enough that I could play "normal" poker. Then it was simply a matter of playing focused, solid poker. That's the good news. The bad news is that I felt like a fish out of water in both 135-man Rush MTTs. Maybe a lesson or two watching the Guru's latest protege, the Mad Moldavian, at work. This kid is supposedly a terror at the Rush MTT tables, and I suspect I could learn a thing or two watching him work. I probably should also delve into my collection of MTT videos to help improve my game. I've got a lot to (re)learn.
Well, that's all for now. I might sneak in another short cash session later tonight, or perhaps not. Maybe I'll just take the rest of the day off and savor the feeling of being in the black this early in the month. October has 31 days, after all, and that's a lot of danger I'm going to have to eventually face...
All-in for now...
-Bug
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