Development, Development, Development!

Howdy blog readers, hope all is well with everyone.

After my 50 buy-in downswing at the start of February I took a few days off to cool down and reconsider my goals for the month. I had originally planned to spend a lot of March studying 6max cash games, since I have a longer term goal of transitioning to cash games exclusively and to never play another sit n go again. Since February's plan went in the toilet, I've bumped this up and spent most of the past 10 days or so immersed in short-handed cash strategy. I'm pretty happy with the progress I've made so far.

Tournament poker and short handed cash are two very different games. I say this for the benefit of those who aren't very familiar with the game. I think it's fair to say that in tournament poker the quality of your pre-flop decisions will largely make or break you as a player, whereas in cash games it's your post-flop decisions that matter most. In cash you're always sitting with at least 100 big blinds which means that most of the time when you're faced with a decision to play for stacks you're sitting somewhere on the flop, turn or river. Adjusting to this has been... surprisingly easy so far. I've already learned a lot in the past week or so.

I've played about 6,000 hands of NL20 to get my feet wet and am up about 12 buy-ins, mostly 2-3 tabling. I've been playing a much more loose-aggressive style than most in order to put myself in as many post-flop situations as possible. I'm doing this not necessarily because it's the optimal way to play, but to get as much practice post-flop as I can on really weak tables. The regulars in these games are super-nitty and few have tried to adjust to my constant pounding away at their blinds and pots. And the fish are not-surprisingly... just terrible. I'll be moving up to NL50 in the next day or so and am not expecting to have to make many adjustments. I'm hoping my stay at NL50 will be brief as the goal is to settle in at NL100 as soon as I can.

Throughout this month I've been wondering about whether my decision to quit the Double Up SNG promotion was correct, or just me being a pussy. I'm pleased to say that after observing the leaderboards and the profit graphs of those competing at the top, I've never felt so good about quitting anything in my life.

To give you a little taste of what these guys are doing to themselves:

Current 1st place

Current 2nd place


You get the idea. Granted, I'm not sure that either of these guys are particularly good to begin with, but even those who were winning before the promo have that very distinct downward slope at the end of their graphs.

In my next entry I'll go into more detail about transitioning to cash. In particular we'll look at the importance of paying attention to the action even when we're not involved in hands, and the importance of taking many brief but still detailed notes on how your opponents play and react to your play. It's through these specific observations of our opponents that we'll learn how to most effectively exploit their weaknesses and end up with their stacks.

Cheers for now!