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I’ve found myself becoming very frustrated with No Limit Holdem over the last two or three months.  It seems that despite getting good coaching and have a reasonably decent grasp of the theoretical side of the game I still keep making dumb mistakes that have been costing me a lot of money.  This certainly isn’t due to a failure in coaching there’s only so many times a coach can tell you to stop doing stupid shit, it’s solely down to me and I really don’t know why.

For this reason I’ve decided to play some PLO instead, partly for a break and partly to see how the standard of play compares to NLHE.  All I can say is “WOW”, the difference between the standard of play is ridiculous.  In NLHE even at the lower limits you need to table select a reasonable amount yet at PLO it sems that you can sit at any table and most of the players at the table will be bad.

I’ve dabbled with PLO a little in the past but only to mess around and certainly I’ve never taken the game all that seriously, and I have to say that I’m really enjoying learning and playing the game at the moment.  I find the extra little nuances of the game that is created by two extra cards to be really interesting and despite the common held belief that PLO is basically a game os flipping and small edges, I’m finding that this really isn’t true at all.  There are a lot of spots where you can get your money in reall really good.  There are also a lot of spots where you can take advantage of some really fundamental errors that a lot of players make preflop and postflop.  I really think that any half decent player with a reasonable knowledge of PLO should be able to make a decent amount of money at the game.  Of course I’m still making some mistakes myself, but I consider that part of the learning process and I usually recognise my mistakes pretty quickly which is a good thing.

There are a few resources that I’ve been utilising to help learn the game:

• Videos from Stoxpoker and Deucescracked
• I recently purchased a book called “Pot Limit Omaha: The big play strategy” by Jeff Hwang.  I’ve found this to be very helpful indeed
• I have been getting some coaching from KasinoKrime from Deucescracked, I’ve only had two lessons so far but they’ve been very good and I’ll definitely be getting more.

While I have been playing I have been making lots of notes on players, which is something I had become really lazy at with NLHE.  This is definitely something that everyone should do as it really helps to be able to make better decisions and more accurately work out what someone’s range is when you’re in a pot with them.  I’m also going to be doing more session reviews as well which is also something I didn’t do that much of with NLHE.  KasinoKrime also sent me a bunch of notes that he had made from videos and books and a load of hand ranges too which I have printed out so I can read them while I’m away in hotels (like I am now) with work.

So it looks like I’ll be mainly playing PLO for the forseeable future, I already have an idea for another blog post based on my observations of players so far and will probably be a little more strategy based.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking in the last couple of days regarding my play and my results.  I haven’t had a winning month since January and it’s really getting to me.  I’ve recently started playing on a site that offers rakeback which will certainly help, but it bothers me that I’m not winning and I’m not really sure why.

I was recently asked to make a video to be critiqued by one of the Stoxpoker coaches to be a video on the site, I downloaded an application called camstudio which is an open source piece of software and really works well for making videos.  It’s also pretty quick when processing the file when it’s finished, when I’ve used other software it’s taken literally hours to do.  While I was watching the video back I saw a couple of things that were bad and it reminded me of a post I saw on the 2+2 forums some time ago.  I can’t remember who posted it or which forum it was in but this guy basically said that if he had his time over again he would record every session he played and watch it back.  After watching my own video back I figured that it would be an excellent idea to do that every time I played.   I have some concerns regarding file size, the one I recently made was 30 minutes and was 177 MB so I will need to look at compression options, but I think I’m going to give this a try for a month and see if there is any noticeable difference.

I had thought that I might also drop down from NL100 to NL50 for a while, but I’m concerned that any results I have while doing this may be to do with playing at a lower limit than anything else.  I haven’t made my mind up on this yet but I still have a reasonable roll for NL100 so it might make sense to stick there for the time being.  I have never done any kind of session review before where I look back at hands I’ve played in Holdem Manager as I’ve never been 100% sure what are the most useful things to look at so I feel that watching a video of myself playing might be a better idea as I can see the whole session and see things in the proper context, such as if there was a history with a player at the table rather than looking at a hand “cold” after the fact.

Another thing I’m looking into at the moment is a pre session “warm up”, I’ve seen a couple of posts regarding this so I’m going to try a few things out and see what works for me.  The first thing I’m going to do while playing is quit IRC, close Skype and MSN and close my web browser.  I normally have all these things open and it may be that they are distracting me.  I’m also going to contact the support department of my new site and see if they can ban my chat. I can’t help but comment on how bad people play when they suckout on me and that’s bad, it’s bad if you tell a player they’re bad and it’s also bad for me as it makes me play worse.  I got Pokerstars to ban my chat on there and it worked wonders for me in terms of tilt because I knew I couldn’t chat and I didn’t stay annoyed at a suckout long enough for it to have a major impact on my play.  I’m hoping that these initial changes will improve my fortunes.

Around October time last year I had visions of giving up work and playing poker professionally, I was playing NL200 and winning at a fairly decent rate.  Then the middle of November came and with it the most brutal downswing I have ever had, by the end of December I was playing NL100 and was nearing the end of an $11,000 downswing.  I seriously thought about cashing out my remaining bankroll and never playing again, I hated the game and I felt really horrible.  It seemed like every time I sat down to play I was losing money.  I had lots of trouble getting to sleep at night and it was pretty much all I thought about during the day too.

I then had an epiphany of sorts, maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought I was, maybe the amount I had been winning before the downswing had started was due more in part to luck than any kind of expert play on my part.  I read a post by Jason Ho (code76545321) on Stoxpoker offering coaching so I decided to contact him.  He initially went through my database and gave me a comprehensive list of the leaks I had, yep it turned out that  I sucked.  I was way too aggressive especially preflop.  I feel like the way I play now and my general understanding of the game is a lot better and I’m enjoying the game much more again.  It was amazing how bad some of the stuff I was doing was, but I couldn’t see it until someone else pointed it out to me, it’s strange how the mind works.

As a result of some of the things I have been going through with Jason and my own experiences I have started coaching a couple of people who are playing lower stakes in the hope that I can help them improve their game and maybe build up a decent reputation for myself and hopefully be able to start charging a small amount for coaching.  I also hope that this will help me improve my own game at the same time.

So next time you’re running bad and think it’s just variance it may be worth looking over all the hands you’ve played in that time or get someone else who’s willing to help you out and make sure that you’re not playing badly.  Of course there is the luck factor and hands that you can do nothing about, but sometimes there are also times where you lost more money than you should have on certain hands because your thought process isn’t quite right.