Pud's Poker Progress / Matthew Pitt / 13 July 2009 / Leave a comment

On Friday afternoon I finally started my No-limit Hold'em challenge by firing up the Betfair Poker client, sitting myself down at four cash tables with astronomical blinds of $0.02/$0.04 and started to grind towards my goal of 10,000 hands.

The thing is the players are absolutely terrible and I mean they are so bad I am actually surprised they know how to turn on their computer. What is worse however is the fact I struggled to adapt to them, making me a bigger fish than they are.

Just over three hours after I had started, I had played 864 hands and was nursing a loss of $2.49, although it could have been much worse as was actually $8.30 down at one stage! Pud the micro fish!

The thing is the players are absolutely terrible and I mean they are so bad I am actually surprised they know how to turn on their computer. What is worse however is the fact I struggled to adapt to them, making me a bigger fish than they are.

A mixture of being surrounded by clowns and not really getting many premium hands lead to my undoing really. I just haven't been able to play my usual game. When I play slightly higher, I naturally play a 25/22 type of style, sometimes looser but over these 864 hands I have run at 19.4/13.6 which is closer to my full ring stats.

The main reason for this is higher up, when you raise you can actually get people to fold. Here, if they have invested just $0.04 to the pot, they have to call regardless. I lost count of the times early in the session where I would raise a MP limper on the button only for both blinds to come along as well as the original limper! Move up where they respect my raises obv!

Even early position raises are met with three or four callers so when you do get Aces they never look very attractive facing three players out of position on a 9c8c7c board. It's madness. The games are certainly beatable and beatable by a huge bb/100 rate but the variance is going to be quite high as you have to have the best hand a showdown, similar to fixed limit.

This hand made me laugh and shows what I'm up against. I'd just moved to this table and won the blinds by raising with 88 and then winning the blinds again the following hand when I found tens and raised a limper. Obviously I'm raising with Big Slick and fist pump called his spite shove. Nice hand sir!

Another AK hand and look at what villain turns up with! After calling a large preflop raise he seems to think his 8 kicker is going to be good here, although I must admit I was a little scared of him having a set of nines. LOL!

It's not all pretty though, especially when you get Kings all-in against Aces and the spike a third Ace on the flop, nor is it a good idea to play like a total donkey and get your money in drawing dead. Don't ask me what I was thinking here, my play is worse than terrible!

So that's that. Almost 9% of the way through NL4 and a mixture of playing bad, failing to adjust and facing incompetent buffoons has caused me to drop the kingly sum of 50-ish big blinds. I've told Mrs P that I'm going to end up killing myself if I don't get out of these stakes soon so expect another 2-4k hands being played by the time I update this blog next.

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

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