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.