Marching past February

I had a little comeback at the end of February to bring me closer to even, but still down overall for the month. For March I'm currently up $200 over just a few sessions.

Last post I mentioned that I'd write a bit about strategy in this post. Here are my current thoughts on no-limit strategy in action!

Percentages
Earlier this year I began to think about how much money I could reasonably make in an average to poor game (APG) during a given session. I had experienced a few "win until I lose" sessions where I had eeked out several small to medium pots to get up $100-$200 in a 2/5 game, only to lose it all back and more at some point later in the session. In an average to poor game (APG), I'm facing more opponents that are as skilled as me or better than me than I would in a good game full of novices and tourists. So, it only makes sense that I would be trading pots and chips in an APG for much of the session. How to change this dynamic?

One of the first poker books I read was by Lou Krieger. In his book, Lou introduced the concept of money management to me as something that was bad and to be avoided. Instead of thinking about a comfortable and solid dollar amount to be up or down, Lou advocated gauging the table and choosing to continue to play if you considered yourself to be a favorite and leaving if considered yourself to be the sucker. But what about the gray area of APG?

I looked around at some of the regulars playing 2/5 on a daily basis to see how they might handle this. Surely, I wasn't the only player to be considering these matters. What I noticed, about these other players was their tendency to change tables more often -- sometimes after just playing one or two hands. If they were up, they'd change games to pocket their profits and play a smaller game for a bit before shifting back to their regular game. By constantly cashing out and changing tables they were protecting their profits while continuing to play. I should mention that not all regular did this. The older and rockier players tended not to budge unless the game got short-handed. They were content to wait for the nuts and hope to get action.

So, let's tie money management together with the idea of investments. A buy-in to a given game is your stake, or investment in that game. When we invest our money in a savings account, stocks, real estates, bonds, etc. we usually have some idea of how much return we'd like to see on that investment given certain conditions. For instance, when I buy stocks, I like to be +/- 10% before I sell. In our APG, where the odds against most players at the table probably range between 60/40 and 50/50, I think a good amount that we'd like to make would be somewhere between 25% - %50 of our buy-in before protecting that win and moving on to a different game. Being up against 8 or 9 evenly matched opponents (in a full game) means you're looking to find something better to play anyway. Picking up 1/4 to 1/2 of your buy-in from those players and leaving should reduce variance, protect your profit and enable you to re-invest in a more profitable game quickly.

That's plenty to read for one post. More to come, soon!