Finally

Well I haven't written a post since February but something fairly momentous happened yesterday in my online poker career. I finally emerged from an earnings plateau that lasted about 6 months and some 50,000 hands. Thank god for Poker Tracker, without which I would have no idea how much money I've made at the tables compared to money from bonuses. When I first got Poker Tracker I was playing mostly $50 and $100 NL and was making around $400/month. At least I did for about 6 months. Then I gave $2/4 and $3/6 limit a try, both 6 max and full ring. I had a great run at $3/6 and then everything fell apart. I lost some $200 at $3/6, then went to $2/4, feeling that I could beat the 6 max games at Poker Stars. That resulted in a $440 beat down. I was probably playing a little too aggressively in some cases but there certainly were a lot of idiots in those games and I'm pretty sure I would have been a winner if I had persevered, but losing 110 big bets in just a few days really killed my confidence at limit, so I switched back to NL. That didn't go much better either, which was very disconcerting because I felt like my skills at NL had improved dramatically since I first started out. I broke even for a few months but was still making a bunch of money from Party and Empire reload bonuses. But over the last month or so I've had a sweet run of cards at $50 and $100 NL and have surpassed my old Poker Tracker high of $3K. I've also solidified in my mind the reason why I can make a lot of money in these games, or put another way, why the competition is so bad. Knowing these leaks makes it easier to identify profitable situations at the poker table. Some of the more significant leaks include: 1) habitually slowplaying AA-QQ preflop. People are so afraid of scaring people out that they just limp in or min raise with these premium hands. They think they are trapping their opponents, but often end up trapping themselves. I love limping in or calling min raises with small pairs, knowing that if I hit my set I will have a good shot at taking some poor fool's whole stack if he has aces or kings. Certainly there are cases where it is profitable to slow play AA or KK preflop, but they are infrequent, and it requires a lot of skill to play these hands post flop. It is generally best to get as much money into the pot preflop when you know you are a big favorite. 2) calling without sufficient pot odds. So many times I see people calling pot sized bets with str8 and flush draws, which will obviously have detrimental effects on the bankroll. 3) bluffing too much with missed draws. Often when I'm out of position and I have a good, but vulnerable hand such as an overpair, I'll put in pot sized bets and get called down by somebody. If they're not raising me then they generally have a worse made hand, like top pair decent kicker, or they are on a draw. Either way, I find the best play is to check the river. The guy with the made hand will bet my hand for me since he sees my check as a sign of weakness and will now value bet his top pair. If I had bet the river he would have just called. But the guy with the draw will not call a bet on the river unless he hit. Therefore betting out on the river against someone who was on a draw is generally minus EV. But if I check to him, showing weakness, he will very often take the bait and make a ridiculous bluff. I'm not saying people should never bluff in this spot. They should. But they do it way to much, so much so that check/calling on the river out of position is a pretty obvious play when there are flush or str8 draws that didn't come through. 4) complete ignorance of how to play on the river. As Sklansky states in the most kick ass poker book ever, "The Theory of Poker," there are many reasons to bet on the early rounds of a poker hand, but there are only two reasons to bet once all the cards are out. Those reasons are to be called down by a worse hand, ie to bet for value, and to get a better hand to fold, ie to bluff. But what I see tons of people doing is making bets and raises on the river that can only be called by better hands. That is, they are making value bets with cards that just aren't that valuble. Here's an example. The other day I had A7o in the big blind. Two people limped in and the small blind completed. The flop came AKx. I wasn't too thrilled with my kicker but opted to bet out to protect my and and to see where I was. The first limper called and the other two players folded. The turn was a blank and I made another half-pot sized bet. Again the guy called. The river was another blank. I decided to make a small blocking bet on the river. This is the opposite of inducing the bluff. In this spot my hand wasn't good enough to call a big bet on the river, so I wanted to dissuade my opponent from making a big bluff, as the bluff would work. Much to my surprise, the guy min raised me. Now it was hard to imagine how the guy could make that play with a worse hand than mine (mostly because I would never consider doing it I guess), but I was getting something like 5:1 pot odds, and since I wasn't 80% sure he was ahead due to the crazyness factor of online players I called. The dude showed K8 and I won the pot. What was he thinking? Was he value betting? Did he really think that I could call a raise holding something worse than middle pair with a shitty kicker? Or was he bluffing? Did he read me for having an ace and a weak kicker and actually believe that he could get me to muck my hand with just a minimum raise on the end? The fact that I actually considered folding is beside the point because 95% of people playing those stakes will call that min raise without a second thought regardless of how weak their kicker may be. Clearly he was not thinking and didn't understand what he was doing. And thank god for people like that, who make it possible to make some decent money playing a card game.