White Belt Poker

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.

I’d been having a bad time recently. Well, I was at least breaking even more or less. But I wasn’t winning consistently the way I had been when I started playing a couple of months ago.

One of the books I’d been reading mentioned that cards can run cold for hundreds of hours. Given that I’ve logged less than 100 hours of playing for money, it’s too early to say whether I had got lucky early on but was now reverting to normal.

But it’s easy to blame the cards.

When I looked at my play through the stats in Poker Tracker I spotted some bad habits that I had got into. With any sport or game which requires repetative practice, there are flaws that can enter into your play that are so small as to be imperceptable over a period of time, but when they are analysed they become more obvious. I realised that there were certain starting hands that were costing me money. The biggest culprit was a suited ace. I had entered this fantasy world where I would play any suited ace from any position. I had convinced myself that Iif I only played them for their flush value then that was okay. The stats showed me otherwise. Although I would’ve sworn that I had won big money from making flushes from suited aces, there wasn’t any evidence of that. In fact, everything below AJs was costing me money – I was in the red. So I decided to go back to play AJs (and above only), unless I’m in late position and there are no raises in front. The other hand was KJ (again). I’d begun to play that pretty slackly, so I may just throw that away routinely unless it’s from late position.

I also noticed from the stats that I wasn’t being nearly aggressive enough – especially before the flop. That’s all tied up with loosening my starting hand requirements. So in the last few days I’ve tightened up and then been very aggressive. The results have been much better. I’ve only lost one hand that went to a showdown in the last four to five hours of play.

I’m not finding it that easy to work out the quality of the players that I’m up against, but one thing I’ve noticed which separates people is the ability to check-raise.

I think it shows that that person has made the effort to learn about the game to some degree and at the low limit tables I’m on, I’ll instantly give someone respect. I won’t run away from the table, but I’ll be careful not to mess with them and I’ll put it in the notes section for that person.

And what a powerful weapon the check-raise can be.

That pause that you get when someone unexpectedly walks into a check-raise is exhilirating. They don’t know what to do. They feel as if they’ve been tricked, but they’re not quite sure how. What are they supposed to do now? Most will eventually fold if they haven’t been in that situation before. Then they’re frightened of you. The pauses get longer if they’re thinking about betting after you because they don’t know what you’re going to do.

This is my first real glimpse of how a little bit of poker knowledge can really elevate you beyond the people who are just playing for fun.