White Belt Poker

A bit of a late night last night, but my bank holiday weekend got off to a great start with me winning almost $50 at the $25 buy-in NL tables at Full Tilt.

I’ve been playing a little more NL recently and things have been going reasonably well. The main reason for starting to play at these NL tables stemmed from the difficulty I was having in finding profitable limit ring games at Full Tilt and the need to start pulling in some of the $200 bonus I have waiting for me.

My strategy is based heavily on HDouble’s low limit NL article from August last year. It’s pretty straightforward and tight – I’m commonly only seeing 20% of the flops – and it can be boring if you’re not getting any cards. Typically it involves a standard raise of somewhere between 3x and 5x the big blind, then a pot-sized bet on the flop if you’re reasonably sure you have the best hand. Obviously there is some room for variation, but that leaves you not having to make too many complicated decisions later on.

Although it isn’t enormously challenging, it’s possible to make more money than playing limit games. For one thing, the NL games have weaker players, which always helps, and your bonus-making potential sky-rockets as other players get involved in huge pissing-contest pots. I saw a pot last night that reached $96 (380x BB!!). I was comfortably playing two tables and won around $30 in two hours, which I would struggle to do even on a good night at my usual 50c-$1 limit tables.

But the most notable aspect for me was seeing just how many people play NL ring games as if they are in a tournament. As their stack reduces to around 30% of the max buy-in they look for all-in opportunities. Why do they do it? I saw someone go all in with 10 7o because there was a 7 on the flop. That’s insane. Without the blinds going up at regular intervals as would happen in a tournament, there is no imperative whatsoever to start playing ‘anything that adds up to
seventeen or more’. You have all night to wait for a hand if you have the patience. That’s the real issue though I suppose. These guys want to gamble and get their chips in there, the way the guys on TV do it. They’ve brought a certain amount of money to the table and they’ll play until it’s gone. God bless ‘em. The trick is to nudge them towards going all-in by gradually ratcheting up the pot when you have the best hand. I busted at least four people out in the space of two
hours doing that.

Of course, the drawback of playing like this is that you’re trying to hide the fact that you don’t want to risk a lot of money. You’re not going to go all-in for $20-$30 before the flop, even if you have aces or kings. But calling an all-in bet from someone who’s desperate to slide all of his chips in when he catches any kind of pair or a weak ace when you have the bet well covered and have a strong hand is a good way to make quick money.

I’ve been following Simon ‘Aces’ Trumper’s diary recently on the Sporting Life website.

A few days ago he wrote about an extraordinary argument he got into in a Super Satellite at the Bellagio with Vinny Vinh, involving sulking, swearing and chip-throwing:

http://poker.sportinglife.com/News/story_65563.shtml

Well, I’ve been having some fun playing (very) low buy-in NL games – mainly at Full Tilt over the weekend.

I started playing at a 0.05c-0.10c table just to familiarise myself with the user interface for raising in NL. As expected the maximum buy-in was $10. Everything looked pretty straightforward. I wasn’t looking to get too involved in the action. Then about five hands in… I got dealt pocket aces. Well, what could I do?? I raised 4x the big bet… and got four callers. The flop came 245. The rest of the hand was a bit of a whirlwind. People were sliding in chips all over the place. One guy ended up going all-in for $2.35 (almost 25% of what he brought to the table, don’t forget) and 23x the big bet!! I think he was relieved to just trust to luck rather than having to make reads (or any kind of difficult decision that required judgement). Luckily, my aces held up. Nobody else had anything better than a pair of fives (the all-in guy), even though they were calling ludicrous bets and raises. I practically doubled-up, making over $9 – or 90x BB!!! In one hand. What an extraordinary introduction to NL.

So this has to be the way to go forward. There is so much action at NL tables wherever you go and there seem to be people who are just desperate to move all-in with rubbish. And at this sort of level, the risk is almost non-existent. I know I caught an unusual hand here but now I see what HDouble meant about the potential for doubling or tripling your buy-in at these tables. Although inevitably you’re just sitting there waiting for the nuts (which can be boring), if it’s this profitable then I don’t care. My game is built on patience and I’m in full-on bankroll-building mode anyway.

I’ve been considering diversifying recently. My intention was always to give myself a solid foundation in hold’em because it’s the most popular game at the moment and there seemed to be more books written about beginning to play hold’em than any other variety of poker.

Over the last month or so, I’ve begun to feel as if I have that solid foundation and now I need to look at other games to continue growing as a poker player. My bankroll still isn’t big enough for me to really play significantly higher limits, so to avoid stagnating and getting frustrated I believe that I have to branch out a little.

I may need to do this by necessity because I’m trying to make a $200 bonus at FullTilt and it’s not going to be easy playing low limit hold’em. There just aren’t enough games going on. Very often there are only one or two tables at the low limits and they seem to have some solid players there. There are very few fish from what I can make out. I’m convinced that I’ll need to play other games to get anywhere near making this bonus.

So the plan is to start learning to play Stud and No-Limit to begin with, then Omaha and maybe Triple Draw later. There certainly seems to be more action at the NL tables and armed with HDub’s excellent blog article about beating these low limit NL games I feel as if I could make some money. It’ll definitely be easier to force people to make mistakes in NL anyway.

My copy of Super System 2 turned up yesterday, so I’ll be delving into a few different sections of that over the next few weeks, along with more of Hellmuth’s book and Sklansky’s Theory. Actually I’m looking forward to learning some new games. I’m sure it’ll stop me feeling like I’m on a treadmill with hold’em – which I suspect could’ve been just around the corner without a bit of variety.