Full House
Join Date: Feb 2009
Posts: 940
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Coming over from live poker, my story is quite different. I got sick of playing live no limit really fast, because even though there is technically less variance over time, no limit played against a bunch of fish (which is what live low limit tables in California are like) presents a peculiar type of short term variance where you end up losing your whole buy-in quite often. Limit was actually better for my sanity-- I could handle longer downswings; for some reason those didn't tilt me as much as seeing some fish run off with a huge stack of my money in a single hand.
When I played NL, I wasn't very good. I was basically doing things I picked up from poker books and on TV. I did know about suited connectors, but I wasn't paying nearly enough attention to stack sizes and I certainly wasn't putting players on ranges or controlling the size of the pot.
When I moved to limit, though, I immediately started making money, because it turned out that at the lower stakes live tables, all you needed to know to make money was how to play a standard tight-aggressive game, indeed almost a nitty game, pre-flop. The other players never adjusted to your style of play anyway, so it didn't matter that you came in and raised with AK after 30 minutes of folding everything. They still paid you off.
To this day, it is possible to make at least $15 per hour just playing 4-8 on tables in Southern California and knowing how to play starting hands pre-flop. You'll make a little more at Indian casinos were the rake is lower.
It was only when I moved up in levels that I started figuring out how to play post-flop. And I came to the online poker world very late indeed-- I started playing it mainly as a form of practice, and I tried to pick levels and tables that played fairly consistently with what I experience playing live. I've made some money playing online, but that's not really the point. The real money is in the casinos, where some very bad players throw some very large sums of money around.
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