Pud's Poker Progress / Matthew Pitt / 15 July 2011 /

Are you all sitting down? Good. I Matthew Pitt has actually stuck to something poker related and managed to play 10,000 hands so far this month. Impressed? Didn't think so, but you should be.

I hardly ever played cash games on Betfair Poker when they had five-handed tables, mainly because they seemed alien to me having played on dozens of other sites that were all six-handed. But since they made the switch over to the industry standard I have been playing four tables on a regular basis and have now played 10,030 hands in July, which for me is monster volume.

During these 10,030 hands I think I have seen everything possible in poker and I have to say I honestly think that the players on Betfair Poker are the worst on the internet, well maybe if you discount Sky Poker that it, but they are pretty bloody horrible! I suppose you could say that about every network at my stakes as I have been forced to play $0.05/$0.10 due to the last few months being uber expensive in the Pudding household. Moving house, a ton of car related problems and having to pay for my flights to Slovenia completely wiped me out and I had to withdraw almost all of my bankroll to cover these costs, and I may still have to withdraw what I have online this weekend.

The last time I put any sort of volume in at the cash tables was when I was playing €0.25/€0.50 on the Entraction Network so playing for a fifth of the stakes was quite demoralising in the first instance but I think it did me some good in all honesty. I say this because "great" winning sessions were not so large that I thought I was a poker genius and losing sessions were not crushing to my ego and soul. At one stage I lost eight buy-ins in two days, which equated to $80 or around £50 but if that had been at my old stakes I'd have been nursing a £350 loss and quite possibly recovering from a suicide attempt.

So how have I done over these 10,030 hands I hear you ask. The answer is pretty damned good. The figure I'm pretending you're interested in is my winnings of $152.28 which is a bb/100 of 15.18 or in other words I'm crushing mofo! I have run pretty well overall with my adjusted EV winnings being $125.54 and me being on the right side of some real cooler hands but I have also been playing pretty good too. I've been trying to be more loose and aggressive and it kind of worked with me running at 27.4/22.7/2.08 and a three-bet of 7.1% but there is still room for improvement that is for sure. My aggression stats is a tad skewed due to me check-folding a lot of boards when three or four players saw the flop but I am still going to work on increasing that closer to the 2.8-3.0 range.

I ran the "Plugging Leaks" reports on Holdem Manager and all of my stats fall within the ideal range, though my check-raising stat was only just in, but a lot of the guys at these stakes are so passive that going for the check-raise is often a pointless exercise as they will just check behind. The reports also highlighted that I am a significant loser with unsuited connectors smaller than KQ, though this is warped slightly by me losing this hand here and some questionable plays with queen-jack, so that is something else to work on for sure.

Currently I am undecided on whether I should move up to $0.10/$0.20 or do another 10,000 hands at these stakes. Whatever stakes I finish up playing my goals will be the same. They are as follows:

1.) Stop checking my profit/loss during a session, a massive problem of mine
2.) Reduce the number of hero calls I'm making on the river
3.) Plug my unsuited connector leak
4.) Stop levelling myself. These guys are mainly fish so I need to think like one of them
5.) Continue to run above EV :o)

Well I'll leave it there for now as I have a busy day ahead and later today I start my journey to Slovenia for WPT Slovenia. I won't sleep until Saturday night and I had a crappy night's sleep last night so it should be a barrel of laughs! Until next time, thanks for reading and best of luck at the tables!

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