Rolled on the River

I’m now 25 days into becoming a No Limit Hold’em player after playing Limit Hold’em professionally and semi-professionally for almost three years. When I started out, all I had was No Limit Hold’em Tournament experience, and hours upon hours of StoxPoker videos in my head.

Although I don’t have time to log several thousand hands per month, I’ve done quite well for myself. At the end of the day, if there is nothing outstanding for StoxPoker and I don’t have any other commitments for a few hours, I’m generally opening up Telescope, finding 8-10 good tables between NL100-NL200, and grinding it out. Results shown below:

Hoo-rah!

Ack! August… This month is truly making poker feel like a grind. I haven’t had a whole lot of time to focus on poker this month (particularly the last couple of days with the new StoxPoker backend being launched) and every time I’ve sat down to play a session I’ve either broken even or lost a few buyins. However! Things are pulling up over the last couple of sessions and hopefully I can turn August into a profitable month!

See below for a graph of winnings:hands from PokerTracker for August:

For comparison here is the final graph from July for No Limit Hold’em (I’m not including my Limit results in this graph since I’ve only played $1/$2 NL Hold’em in August so far):

Well No Limit went incredibly awesome for July and I’m over the moon about it. Below are my last two weeks in July (click the images for a larger view):

FullTilt:

PokerStars:

All in all I think my No Limit game has improved dramatically. I think the two biggest reasons for this is hitting the tables and of course the number of poker videos I watch each day by working for StoxPoker. Without StoxPoker I can easily say that I wouldn’t have made half of the money I did and definitely wouldn’t feel as good about my No Limit game as I currently am.

Added to this I also booked a good lot of hands at fixed limit and as soon as I get my Hold’em Manager database working again I’ll post those also (I personally find PokerTracker to be by far the best HUD for No Limit and Hold’em Manager to have statistics which I refer to more in Fixed Limit - I hope to elaborate on this more in a future post).

Well my first week truly focusing on No Limit is over - so how did I do? Overall I’ve had a pretty odd week, I started on the deepstack $1/$2 (400bb’s deep) No Limit tables and made almost $1500 in just under 150 hands with one incredible heater (I doubled up early and then doubled up through another big stack with a set of Aces verses a set of Ten’s on a dry board). Unfortunately this pretty much closed the books on my No Limit action for the week since I spent the rest of the week mostly doing StoxPoker work and playing a few hands of Limit Hold’em here and there.

Overall I’m quite surprised at how easily a lot of the 200NL players are willing to stack off for 100 big blinds or more. I can’t understand how so many players are happy going broke with top pair / top kicker on dry boards. If a player is willing to stack off with you on a relatively dry board then he is either way ahead or way behind you, so why are these players happy putting the money in so easily? I am seeing so many players finding creative ways to call with the most ridiculous of hands. I love it - but it’s hard to understand what’s going on in these players minds.