Zero To Sixty

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.