Limit Hold Em Experiment - Week 1

Well it was a bit of a roller coaster the first four days. I want to make sure I do regular updates of my progress so it is best I go ahead and cut the first week short and from here ono out this is when I will do my update. Also I had a few people comment about how hard it is to make a profit at the smaller limits. I have to agree to some extent. The unpredictable nature of your opponents at low levels of online Limit Hold Em certainly make it harder to determine when your opponent is holding a true hand.

However, this goes back to my last post. If you are "playing the person" are you really playing ABC poker. I don't think so. Again I think people our trying to "BEAT THE GAME", but at the lower levels all you have to do is "play the game". If I have AA and the flop brings an A but also makes a possible straight I am going to proceed with caution. I will bet but if I am played back at, and I am not 95% certain my hand is good I am going to check/call the rest the way keeping the pot small. It is easy enough to build a big pot at this level that the little money you may leave on the table can be made up for.

I recently started to reread HDouble's Blog. On it he had a quote from Bill Chen that kinda of opened my eyes a bit.

"When we sit down at a table, every hour we're essentially doing a coin toss for a rack of chips. Now if you're a skilled player you may have an overlay of half a stack (assuming 100 chips in a rack and 20 in a stack). So if you're a skilled $3-6 player, it's like flipping a coin and getting $120 if you win and losing $100 if you lose or if you're a 15-30 player it's $600 if you win, $500 if you lose. Now this is a pretty huge edge when compared to blackjack on a per-hand basis but we shouldn't be too surprised at all if we get on a bad streak and lose $3000. How easy is it to flip tails 6 times a row? It's bound to happen if you flip coins all the time -- now 10 or 15 in a row is a little unlucky but nothing too phenomenal."

This is when I started coming up with my ABC strategy to poker. I will try to make a full post on exactly what that ABC strategy is in the near future, but I am still working on it for now.

Sorry for the long winded post I guess I will give my first update.

I have so far played 1160 hands of .50/1.00 - 1.00/2.00 LH. My profit over the first three days of the experiment was 51BB but I slid 32 BB the last day of play after a session which saw my KK lose twice, and 3 times my over pair was beat when a small pp flopped a set, and 2 set over set situations. I pressed on and eventually started to tilt off my stacks. I went through the hand history and noticed I had actually just given away 20BB. I also notice a huge leak in my game which cost me 19BB over the three days. Seems I was playing AQs to the river even if I was unimproved. Not sure why I did that but I will watch out for that in the future. I ended up in the green for 16.1BB so I am averaging 1.6BB/100 hands so far.


Anyways here is my graph for the first week.

My Limit Hold Em Experiment

As stated in my previous post, I am working on a basic Limit Hold ‘Em Strategy that will make money over the long run to build my roll. Part of the reason for this experiment is to try to instill a solid foundation of play for myself to work off of.


The basic strategy is to play ABC poker and play a lot of volume.

I actually started the Limit Hold ‘Em and sat down to play ABC poker last week. I quickly learned I really truly don’t know what ABC poker is. Furthermore, I don’t think that a lot of people that post on forums or blogs really truly know what it is either. We get so wrapped up into the strategy, and the outplaying of each other that we look beyond the basics before we ever really know them. I would compare it to a little kid learning how to play baseball for the first time.

What does every little kid try to do the first time the step up to the plate?

Well they try to hit a home run of course.

Now coaches and parents alike immediately start to teach them that they have to first learn how to hit the ball consistently before they can consistently hit a home run.

Our lives are full of walk before you run metaphors that could be used here. Learning to drive is another one. Most kids don’t start driving a Cadillac. So why would you start by playing the Cadillac of Poker?(NL Hold ‘Em). Yet this is what the majority of us do, and we struggle through playing 5NL, 10NL, 25NL trying to build that bankroll like so many of our favorite players.

If get past the hype of some of these players that have rocketed to the highest of all stakes in short amounts of time. Most of them were playing 5/10-25/50 LH before they started playing no limit. They walked before they ran, they cut their teeth in a more consistent game.

All these thoughts is what has led me to make the switch to Limit Hold ‘Em. I know I have what it takes to be a decent player. I also have three horrible traits that make me a perfect candidate to become a degenerate gambler that sells my body for buy ins.

Those three traits are.-

I am easily affected by tilt.

I don’t have the patience to stay within my roll

I don’t have the discipline to always pass up –EV situations.

I really do think that this experiment will help me with all the above, and that the ultimate goal of playing 250k hands of limit will really give me a good foundation to be a better player later on.



Enough about the end of this experiment let’s talk about the beginnings of it. The first part of my Limit Hold ‘Em Experiment is.

Goal: Play 25,000 hands .50/1.00 and 1.00/2.00

In doing this I am going to move up when I hit 300BB for the next level and move down when I have only 200BB for the current level.

Since Limit Hold ‘Em is a game of small edges I will not donate any BB by coming into a game in the middle of an orbit. I will always wait until the BB comes back around. I will also to the best of my ability play through an entire orbit before getting up off the table.

Those two are habits that I see people doing quite often and I think very detrimental to your win rate in the long run. I will post my progress weekly on this blog and over at Raise the River in there “Other Games Forum” I really hope to get as much input on my play and my journey as I go.

I guess that’s it for now. I will be back Fri for sure to post my first week of statistics for this here experiment. Hopefully I will return to give random posts before then as well.

I had to come back...

It might not be as substantial of an occurrence as the second coming of Christ, but I just could not stay away from poker and my blog for the entire six months of me preparing for my promotion test.

Anyways I am not playing all the time but playing consistently enough that I decided to give my self a little direction. I decided I wanted to try to build a decent roll and after a little experimentation I have decided on Limit hold Em for now.

You can check on my basic strategy over at Raise the River where I have posted a starting hands chart for other members to critique. The plan is to play at least 25k hands at either .50/1.00 LH or 1.00/2.00 LH to test out my starting hands requirements. The main reason fo the chart is because I feel the part of my game lacking the most is discipline to let go med and marginal hands.

Anyways I decided that since I have a direction and an attainable goal of VOLUME instead of a $$$ amount I thought I would come back here, and keep people up on my progress.

So the next post I will make will be the actual "guidelines" for the experiment which I am hoping goes well enough to take beyond 25k hands, but we will see.

A couple other things on my plate...
Go thru BlogRoll and take out inactives like me
Finish the "My Poker Library" section
Post at least one hand per session to the RtR forum for its members to critique.
Get back on Melted Felts Blogroll.... <--- Hint Hint MARK...