I've got a good handle on the microstakes and am currently spectating the $2/$4 tables where the buy-ins are higher. I think I've got a good minimal-variance and maximized-profit approach and thought I'd share my observations. I'm by no means an expert but I think for an absolute beginner some of this could be useful.
So I busted my first two $30 deposits at Bovada. I was winning at the lowest possible microstakes, 2c/5c, right off the bat, but I blew it all on Blackjack. (Don't do that ever.) I was whittled down on a $30 deposit on Full Flush to nothing, but I won the $1000 Depositor's freeroll. I don't like that client so I'm trying to find out how Western Union withdrawals work.
After my third Bovada deposit, I finally got the ball rolling and got up to $700 never multitabling more than 3 playing 5c/10c. So I've recovered my losses, and paid off the poker resources such as books I've bought by Sklansky and Lee Jones.
Best way to get started: Shortstacking
Shortstacking is far and away the single most effective thing you can do to learn NLHE at any given limit you are new to. Why is this?
1. Reduced complexity and risk
At the beginning, your goal is to
fully master the ABCs of poker. This means sticking to your starting hands. Shortstacking will mitigate the temptation to limp in with trash hands because you have fewer big blinds. This is a winning formula. Multitabling 3 at a time, playing tightly and taking your opportunities to see the flop at the right price, and leveraging it to the hilt when you connect with the flop, is how you will win.
You will develop the ability to slowplay and deceive opponents when you actually have the nuts. This is admittedly the easiest part of Hold 'Em, but remember the way you naturally play when you're that confident. Later on, when you incorporate bluffing into your game, you have to hold onto that feeling.
And we can't understate the importance of wringing every last penny of value from having the stone cold nuts. It happens so rarely. By reading the board and putting your opponent on a hand, and how strong you appear, you. If you seem pot-committed and desperate, and maybe he's improved to a straight against your nut flush, it may be correct to throw in a Tom Dwan overbet and escalate into an all-in showdown.
Knowing when to checkraise, when to minraise, go all in, read your opponent's confidence etc. This is something every player is capable of doing even as a beginner, so focus on that.
The very first quads I made... I got 11 cents out of. Now I'm able to get someone go all in and take his entire stack.
2. Tilt control
It hurts lose to lose your buyin. Starting adding $.50, then $1.00 as you get more comfortable. At the beginning with 2c/5c tables, I'd jump in with $2.00, roll up to $8.00, then leave and put it aside. If I get wiped out, I can shrug it off because I'm up in the other tables.
If you're prone to tilting, then quit ALL the tables, bank your earnings, and go back in with the same shortstack. Go down to 2 tables at a time just so that you don't blow.
3. Conditions you not to play trash hands.
The worst part of microstakes isn't the donkfests and suckouts by fish who have no regard for pot odds etc. It's that you're tempted to go in with J2o because it's so easy to limp. It will happen more often than you care for, your variance spikes up like mad because when you flop a set and if you progress in the hand, you're going to lose at the showdown. These marginal hands are dangerous and how most novice players get into trouble.
It's a horrible habit. Fold trash even if you're in the small blind and need only 3c to call. If you wouldn't play it at higher stakes, don't limp with it here.
If you do limp in from small blind with 72o just for shits and gigs, pray you don't connect and can throw that hand away. If you flop two pair, then bet big and take that pot down right then and there.
This discipline is the first thing you need.
It means nothing if you're able to maintain discipline for only the first three hours of a session. Or if you need to take the tough lessons and swallow the bitter pills, at least protect your bankroll by shortstacking until you're as patient as the Dalai Lama.
This will put you into the small or big winner category at least.
Experimentation
In conjunction with shortstacking, experimentation is key. I did advocate very tight range, but for a reason. The overall point to playing poker and making any kind of side income is that you're winning.
By shortstacking and being prudent, you will hit the ground running and be at least a marginal winner. You can take three or so bad beats and shrug it off no problem.
You have to separate your game into different regions. You have a firm foothold in a stake level where you know what works, and use some of your gains to develop your game and add aggression until you've fully mastered a level.
I'll play 5c/10c with a full buyin at three tables and assign them "Standard TAG play" status and build up my money. Tables 4 and 5 on the other hand are my experimentation tables where I'll practice LAG style play. Adopting the LAG-style at the right table is enormously profitable and will do wonders for your confidence.
At this point, you're doing better than minimum wage (not accounting for withdrawal fees) if you're doing it fulltime (I'm a uni student still though). Stealing pots at opportune moments. Broaden your starting range a little by little. Use PokerStove.
Remember the feeling of dread when certain turn or river cards fall
Think of specific spots, board textures where you felt like "Fuck, not this shit again..." When you feel yourself freeze up when a scary card falls and you get a pot-sized bet fired at you, fold, but note that down. Think of these specific scenarios like a repertory.
Then put yourself in the shoes of the guy who's exploiting your fear. Realize there is
nothing preventing you from being him the next time around (assuming position of course).
Familiarizing yourself with certain spots
Certain boards are easy to manipulate. The dynamic of a hand can change completely, as will the psychology of your opponent. Basically it's putting yourself in the other guy's shoes and being the aggressor and learning the "safe" places you can take down a pot. Figuring out how position, stack sizes, hand ranges compare, etc.
Do this in your "Experimentation" tables until you've gone through that scenario hundreds of times, then incorporate it within your "Standard" play repertory.
Things that seem high variance at first will actually reveal themselves to be LOW variance.
REVIEW HAND HISTORIES
Every hand you participate in, or as an observer, you're paying attention to what type of player your opponents are. You have an impression of his skill level and tendencies, whether he's generally a nit, fish, TAG, LAG, etc. If you get pushed out of a pot, go check the hand histories and see whether your guess was right.
This is THE huge advantage of online poker over live poker. If your opponent mucks in the casino, you'll wonder forever if you made the right decision. There is NO excuse not to check the hand histories whatsoever. You can't be aggressive and ramp up your profits without developing your hand reading skill and feel for the other players.
How deep can you go with this? You can look at how players fold with what hand strength vs. what hand strength their opponent represented, and to what bet size, how check-bet-check-raise progressions on the way to the river defined the hand.
If you got rivered while slowplaying, you can look back and see if maybe there were warning signs that you should have pushed someone out of the pot after the flop. This is how you fine-tune.
You ultimately need to do this to really
learn from your hand experience. I'd rather do this for 10k hands and dissect them, really get the most of my investment in time, than play 100k a month and risk burnout.
Preflop play
Preflop play is where things are the simplest, and you stand to make lots of money without even . If you have a hand with good blocker value.
Pay attention.
Knowing when and where to blind steal is. If you've seen, don't be afraid to shove or raise 4 times the big blinds.
The thing is, you have to Learn EQUITY. There is no getting around this. Learning equity is what will make you and break your opponents. This is something you hone incrementally. Equity is how you choose what to do, a comparison of your read on your opponent's hand range against yours. The PokerStove tool is a godsend and you should download it and use it as you play. You'll gradually know right off the bat whether you are the underdog and if the pot odds justify you going in or not.
With AK I'll always , and sometimes they'll take the bait. At worst, it's a coin flip and you're up against a pocket pair, but quite a few players will take you up on it with AQ or AJ. You are the favorite. This is where the big slick shines. But again, having the hand histories and knowing the general trend of how players play in early position is important, even on Bovada where the players are anonymous.
This is key to tournament play as well:
Watch videos of players actually winning these online tournaments.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rUK1QpcJcw Let their casual, mild manner while playing aggressively rub off on you and realize that it's really not a big deal. The guy crushing your table in the ringgame is probably watching sports highlights while he's steamrolling everyone.
But he illustrates the importance of pot stealing in the tournament context.
You can nearly always finish in the money by your preflop play alone. Stacksizes, betsizing, and position is important here. Calling in early position and what happens? You get someone raising you for half your stack, and you've wasted a big blind, probably when your stack was too shallow to afford it. There's a great moment in the video I linked to where Gripsed notes exactly that. It's all position-dependent.
I might play 5 or 6 hands en route to cashing. Think about that. You don't have to outplay everyone else on every hand to win the tournament. This skill alone is enough to get you to the final table, and certainly in the money.
You're using position to isolate people you think you can induce a fold from. People will keep calling in early position and hope not to get pressured. Sometimes if you have a good read you'll ambush someone going all in with AQ or AJ or, while you hold AK. This is where the big stick is unmatched.
I'm rather mildly working on developing a cash-game + tournament unified strategy where the aim of my cash-game play is to make sure I have enough to get me into a good spread of tournaments. I'll take the standard approach in the early rounds, bust out of some, then devote my attention to the ones where I make the final table.
The past two weeks I was multitabling five $5 buy in tourneys where I made it in the cash in three. I'd busted out of two, made it to the final table in all three others, and take 1st in one. For the last week I busted three, then finished in the cash in all the others. Well beyond the initial investment and a big fraction of my $700. That's already a nice side income on a weekly basis and this is current to modern online poker.
Avoid add-on/rebuy tournaments if you can.
In my opinion, it's all about
incrementalism. The more theory you know, and specifically the concept of equity, the more you will break down your limitations and overcome scarcity mentality. At the beginning I thought "Someone raised ten times the big blinds, I have no choice but to lay down AQs." Now if I've put the opponent on a range and have majority equity, I'll happily pay to see the flop and take it from there. In a few months I expect I won't be using PokerStove anymore.
Things will come to you. My best moment? In the little tourney I won, I just had that feeling that two guys had raised with AK/AQ/AJ or something while I had pocket 3s, just because that's generally how it goes. I put them all in,
they turned out to have the same hand (AK and AK), so I busted them out and I arrived in that final table as chip leader, and indeed took first.
And realize,
you are supposed to get lucky.
But how do you utilize luck correctly?
The purpose of blind stealing and pot stealing is that you can afford to gamble. This is what Doyle Brunson advocates in Super System:
he's able to take stabs at massive pots as an underdog because he can afford to because of these aggressive takedowns of smaller pots. He's earning the ability to make plays at these huge pots.
Learn to fold weak full houses, especially if it's a frightening board texture at the flop. If you get the right price and are in later position, see the turn and if you don't hit quads, bail. This goes back to marginality I brought up in shortstacking - you want to minimize higher variance plays like this. Because you will be reeled into an all-in showdown, and you WILL lose everything you gained that session to a better full house or quads. Deny him the opportunity to stack you.
This one specific spot is probably the single biggest correction to your game you can make as a beginner or intermediate. Recognizing when you're a massive underdog even when you objectively have a monster hand is pretty major. This is something Isildur1 does
automatically because he figures it's -EV. Don't think scarce, realize a better opportunity is around the corner.
Do your own analysis regarding pot stealing. If someone pushes back at you and mega reraises you, just let it go. If they make a stand and try and punish you only once every five times, so what?
View your chips not as money, but as your weapons. They are the bullets in your six-barrel revolver, your scouts. When you attempt a pot takedown at the flop by firing a 1/2 pot bet, and you get a pot-sized reraise or a sketchy call, fold and don't get upset.
Don't think of it like "Wow, I just wasted money. It totally failed that time."
No. It WORKED. You have SAVED yourself money because otherwise he would have valuetowned you to hell and sprung a mega reraise on you at the river. You're got overall EV from this play, so you're not going to force it like a fish and you take the next pot (not necessarily on that exact same table).
Do your homework, read, even spend hours watching the higher stakes games from the rails taking notes. The hand ranges and preflop-postflop play changes each time you move up the ladder and it'll save you money if you go in knowing something of what to expect.
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