Welcome

Hello all, welcome to my online poker blog.

I've been playing on and off for a decade after being introduced by a friend.

I played regularly for a few years during the poker boom and had a decent record at the micros, particularly Rush and Zoom No Limit Hold'em games (here's one of my graphs).

Around 2012 I began a new career which involved immersing myself completely in study in my spare time, so I had little to no time for poker. However recently this burden has eased and so I have been gradually dipping back in.

I'm an amateur player who still hopes to some day beat the rake.





Saturday 22 May 2010

Playing the small pockets

Today I played 5000 hands. I altered my strategy a little bit, I normally fold the smaller pocket pairs to a raise but after reading a little strategy advice I decided to call with them in position. I also began playing them for a raise from early position. The problem with doing this is that it impacts the red line or non showdown winnings. We must sacrifice red in order to gain showdown winnings. It's true that I won a couple of big pots from sets today but overall the red line cost me over fourty dollars whereas for the past 20k hands or so I'd been break even. I think I'll return to the previous strategy that was netting me 3BB/100 on average. Whether I'm sacrificing equity by folding 22-66 in early position is very hard to measure. We suffer in numerous ways:
1/ If we're 3-bet we usually have to fold. I don't believe calling off 10% and set mining is profitable (although I may check this with pokerazor)
2/ We often get multiple callers so we must play fit or fold on the flop and we only hit 11% of the time so often we're losing a 30c bet
3/ When we do get multiple callers they often have weak ranges that will not pay off two streets of value once we do hit our set
4/ The sorts of calling hands we see will often include better pairs and so there's a chance we may run into a better set
The truth is that we must get paid 9*30c = $2.70 on average when we hit a set (assuming a fit or fold mentality) to make these plays profitable. Rush poker seems so nitty that I'm really not sure this is actually going to happen. So it was a nice experiment but I'll return to my tight range based style.

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