Chalk and cheese

Pud's Poker Progress / Matthew Pitt / 31 January 2011 / Leave a Comment

Last week I made the decision to stop being a wuss and start to play for stakes a few levels above what I usually do. Whilst I've not been rubbing shoulders with Tom Dwan and company, I have been playing a few hands of NL50, which I guess is five times the stakes of my previous micro-stake adventures.

Writing about poker strategy, discussing poker with good players and getting to watch some of them in action at EPT events has got me thinking on a higher level than the majority of micro-donks and I find it not only boring but extremely difficult to play the robotic ABC style needed to beat these droolers, not to mention I do not see the point in grinding all month to make $100, seems pointless.

Anyway, the first session went pretty badly and saw me drop very close to a buyin after only 78 hands. I wasn't overly worried as I lost a large percentage of the money in a blind versus blind scenario where my opponent slowplayed a pair of aces all the way to the river after I had flopped top pair, and another where I called down a complete fish with ace high after picking up the nut flush draw on the turn, only for him to be sat there with a pair of sixes on a board reading Jd-Kd-Jc-2d-7h.

My second run at NL50 saw me play 511 hands, not bad for two tables at once, and saw me win almost three buyins despite getting stacked early doors when me read was completely off and villain was sat their with the effective nuts. Basically I completely destroyed the game, it was great fun and very profitable too, something I could quite easily get used to. But as Newton so eloquently said, "What goes up, must come down" and he was certainly correct as I got completely hammered last night, completely.

Nothing I did worked, if I had a strong hand they had a slightly stronger one, it was a complete nightmare. Oh and it doesn't help when the craziest mofo you have ever played against, playing a 94/61/3 style turns a Royal Flush, plays it like a pansy then you pay him off on the river when you hit a well disguised straight. Short-stackers raped me too, I lost 12 hands that were in the $10-$20 size due to basically not winning flips. AK versus deuces, AQ versus QJ, AQ vs AK, TT versus JJ, as an example. And then there are the complete tools who hit two outers on you like they are going out of fashion. Rigged!

All in all that puts me around 1.25 buy-ins down after being two up, but I do recoup around half of that through rakeback and I have only played 1,500 hands so a lot of it should just be variance and bad luck running into the top of people's range. I've not felt out of my depth once yet so I am 100% confident I can turn it around.

Until next time, thanks for reading and best of luck at the tables.

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