Pud's Poker Progress / Matthew Pitt / 26 May 2008 / 5 Comments

Anyone who knows me knows that I change my mind about what I want to play with alarming regularity. In the past I have set myself silly little challenges that I have kicked to the kerb as soon as the going got rough and this has really hurt my game.

This month has been different though. I don't know what has happened but I have been able to grind out a boatload of hands and I've not tilted (more...) once when I've lost a stack due to my or my opponents bad play. However, I still feel a change is needed.

At the start of the month I made the switch from short-handed cash games to full ring, mainly because the games are more straight-forward, less volatile and are full of much weaker players as a general rule. I played 9-12 tables and quickly amassed 16k hands and a nice little profit as a result of this volume. When I reviewed my play using my database I found I had left a lot of money and expected value at the tables due to a new breed of player. The micro-stacker.

Alex Martin (more...) is an online pro who writes some articles for one of the top poker publications in the UK. In the latest edition he says that the short-stackers are killing the cash games online. I've never given them much thought before but I've encountered dozens of players who buy in for just 20 times the big blind and the dynamics of the table change for the worse. I always buy in for 100xBB to maximise my profits when I make my hands and also to give you better implied odds (more...) when you're drawing to hands. The micro-stackers though are just looking for a spot to get their chips in and it means you often don't have the odds to play certain hands and the other people at the table realise that this is what they're doing and they tighten up and the money flows less and less freely.

I found this to be even worse at the heads-up tables. I'd buy-in for $20 then someone would come and sit down with $4! At first I'd play them but I found them irritating and eventually if someone sat down with less than 50xBB I just sat out and told them to go find a different table! It got so bad that I have stopped playing HU cash games because I spend more time sitting out then actually playing. There is also a rake issue but that's for another post. So over the weekend I found myself playing some HUSnG again, like I had a month or so ago. With HUSnG everyone starts off on an even number of chips and it's up to you to whittle them down and claim the entire prize. Things went pretty well and I won 15 of my 22 games for a nice profit but I think some of this was down to my opponents' inability to play the game properly rather than me owning them at the tables!

So why has a crossroads being reached? Well I am now bankrolled for the $21 HUSnG, at a push the $22 SnG's and if I am careful with table selection I could play NL50. At all these stakes I will be leaving the realm of the micro-stakes for the first time in a long long time and I am now at a point where I could start to make some half decent money from this game that I love to hate! The plague of short-stacks in the cash games are putting me off playing them, the sharks lurking in the HU games are making me a little weary of them and the fact I have never really had good results at the micro SnG's doesn't make me want to part with my hard-earned bankroll! I guess I'll just have to have a little think and then settle on one. Any suggestions from you the reader?

I'll be looking forward to reading the blog of the new Betfair pro John Tabatabai who joins regular bloggers Sorel Mizzi (more...) and Annette Obrestad on this site.

As always, thanks for reading and best of luck at the tables!

Tags: Alex Martin, avoid tilt, HU cash games, HUSnG, micro-stakes, poker challenges