Zero To Sixty

Oh my goodness, I haven’t updated this blog in ages, and there is quite a bit of news. Let’s get caught up, shall we? Okay, on Carbon Poker I got in the money on a freeroll. That gave me a bankroll of a little more than $1.00. I took that bankroll and then started playing cash tables (as I said in my plan). Starting with 2/4 penny cash tables, I actually built my bankroll up to around $50.00. Then things went bad.

There were some ups and downs, but three single hands took me from $50 to less than $2! The first was an ace high flush where I went all-in and then lost to a full house. That took me to around $30. Then I went all-in again with an ace high flush and, you guessed it, lost again to a full house. I’m not sure how often that happens, but it just devasted my bankroll.

I was down to about $11 and then went all-in against a loose-aggressive player with 99 preflop. This came shortly after I had lost in the secon full house, and clearly I was making poor decisions and was on tilt. I lost to an overpair draw and that took me all the way down to pretty much exactly where I started–less than 2 dollars.

I had no choice but to start at the 2/4 penny level again, and it didn’t take me long to get to $5. I then switched to nickle/dime blinds cash games, and in three days I find myself back up to $20. Actually, I’m finding the nickle/dime cash games quite lucrative. I don’t win the big $20 pots, but I also lose extremely rarely and can easily make $5-$10/night.

The downside, of course, is that I will never make it to $60K at that pace. So I have a new plan. The first part is that I will only commit one third of my bankroll max at each cash table session. The second is that I will accelerate up the limits much slower. As you can imagine, I previously quickly went up to the 50 cent/1 dollar blinds level and that’s what wiped me out quickly. I believe by taking it more slowly, I’ll be better prepared for the chip and knowledge requirements of a higher level.

The other downside is that I’m not earning enough comp points on Carbon Poker to qualify for high dollar value freerolls. As a player, you receive comp points for playing cash games, and the higher the level, the more comp points you earn. If you earn 2,000 comp points over three days, you qualify for free entry into $1k and $2K tourneys. Part of my plan was to play plenty of $1K and $2K freerolls, but that plan will have to wait until I can handle the cash games that generate the comp points to let me qualify for those.

All in all, I’m in a good spot: Not broke and still learning!

I just lost $12 playing on cash tables at Absolute Poker. The reason is very easy. It’s not that I played poorly or that I played against much better players. The reason is that I played against much looser players. In fact, I was at a table of maniacs–players that will play every hand, play all hands to showdown, and are aggressive with poor holdings.

I figured that in such a setting I would do well. Generally speaking, a tight and aggressive player like myself will just own maniacs. Their aggression is usually punished eventually. So what happened? I didn’t realize the difficulty in doing this against a table of 3 or more maniacs. Basically, you are almost entirely at the whim of chance unless you have the drop dead nuts.

For example, you can have a strong holding preflop and raise. Normally, that would eliminate a lot of the moderate and poor holdings that just through pure chance might improve on the flop. Against a table of at least three maniacs (like I was playing against), such a strategy doesn’t do anything except put more money in the pot. When the flop hits, you have the unhappy scenario of facing the following: At least one of the opponents may have improved his or her hand and possibly one other is excited enough about a dubious holding that they’ll face down big bets to take it to the river.

Here is but one example of many: On the flop my opponent had a flush draw and nothing else. I raised the pot with the expectation that flush draws would fold due to the horrible pot odds. Nope. Next card falls and I had three of a kind. I raise the pot again. My opponent, with nothing more than the hope of a  flush, calls. And… you guessed it: They hit the flush on the river.

Normally, this would happen so rarely that the tight player would rake it in when those flushes don’t hit, but with three maniacs on the table, they will hit good hands often enough that it lowers your number of good pots considerably.

Now the recommendation from experts is to change tables. But I did that a few times and found maniacs at all of them. Such is the problem with low stakes poker, I guess. The other option is recommended by Sklansky–just play rank 1-3 hands and then play your nuts flops to get your blinds money back and more. This is not that effective against multiple maniacs, unfortunately, due to the odds of them improving their hands so much on the flop due to multiples of them at the table.

I’m at a loss.

Okay, a lot has happened over the past day and a half, so let me walk through it. On Absolute Poker, I won some money in a free roll, worked it up to enough money to join a tournament, and came in seventh place in that tournament, which earned me a total profit of $13.16. When you add this to the $0.25 at Full Tilt Poker this means that I’m $13.41 toward my goal of $60,000.00.

Part of that $13.16 on Absolute Poker includes $1 or so that I won on the cash tables playing .02/.04 limit poker. After the intensity of tournaments over the past couple weeks, low limit cash tables were like shooting fish in a barrel. In about an hour I earned $1 with penny stakes. Hey, I’ll take it. I have a long way to go!

The bulk of my winnings came from the Absolute Poker tournament, which had a $1.10 buy-in. I got kicked out by the eventual winner on a hand where I played pretty well but got busted on a flat out better hand.

Anyway, I’m debating on sticking to cash tables for the next few days to see how I do. My feeling is that trolling the cash tables is a much more effective way of making money via Internet poker than playing in tournaments. We’ll see.