Week 2 Beginnings

Don't be surprised if you bust only playing on 3/4 bi. Most people recommend that you should have about 20BI to play a given stake at NLHE, and when trying to learn the basics it is not unreasonable to have 5bi swings (tbf its not unreasonable to have 5bi swings at any time) due to the variance of the game.

What math are you referring to? There are situations for math but playing general hands and value betting against worse holdings doesn't really need any, especially at microstakes.
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For things like pocket pair set mining, you can do the analysis before you sit down at the table and make a basic rule to follow i.e. you flop a set 1/8 (12.5%) of the time, so under the assumption that you are going to get it allin every time, if someone's preflop raise is <12.5% of your effective stack (the lowest of either your or villains stack, i.e. the total amount that can get in the middle should you both shove), you should call to try and hit your three of a kind. However, this is obviously a flawed assumption (you can't get all the money in every time), so you can make this smaller, to something like if the raise is <5% or 1/20 of the effective stack. This would allow you to say: "Ok so I have a pocket pair, there is a preflop raise before me of 4bb however because the effective stack is greater than 4*20 = 80bbs, I can call here and profitably set mine due to my implied odds".

I think most of the rest boils down to basic counting of outs, which is 95% of the time straight draws and flush draws.

This is basically: How many cards can come that give me the nuts/best hand on the next street and can I *make x play* given those odds? Easiest example is with nut flush draws, Axs where you have two of the same suit on the flop. To make the flush here, there are 9 remaining cards of our suit in the deck. To make this calculable on the fly, we assume that the deck has 50 cards in it left that are unknown to us (this is approximately true, preflop there are 50 we don't know, on the flop there are 47 etc) which makes it remarkably easy to work out what our odds are. As I said, 9 cards can come that will give us the nuts, and the probability of that is 9/50, so just doubling that we get 18%.

The odds are split into two categories, pot odds and implied odds. Pot odds are easier but not as useful. If the villain's bet is less than 18% of the total pot here, we can call every time and try to hit simply due to money in the pot. Implied odds are based upon other things such as what tendencies villain has shown (like whether they will bet again on a future street/spazz out with TPTK), where we can call without pot odds due to the implied odds of us hitting and getting more money from their stack later. If you think the hand will go allin a good percentage of the time, the implied odds is of the effective stacks between yourself and villain, but obviously implied odds are a sliding scale based on how much money you think you can get out of them when you hit.

For example: If you know that villain will bet again if a flush comes on the turn but will c/f the river then you don't have the implied odds for getting stacks in, but you can call more than the pot odds from from the flop would indicate. Implied odds are a judgement call that depend on the villain basically and comes with experience and practice.

I cba to write any more but I think that's it? If I've missed anything fundamental then someone better can explain or whatever.

Gl at the tables.

Your profit at this level is going to come from betting the river, not calling river bets. Just keep that in mind, and realize that if you have somehow made it to the river and are the one simply calling, you are probably behind.

On February 10 2011 08:14 NewbSaibot wrote: Your profit at this level is going to come from betting the river, not calling river bets. Just keep that in mind, and realize that if you have somehow made it to the river and are the one simply calling, you are probably behind.

ya +1 tbh

Wow! Okay, thanks Giga, that cleared up a lot of things for me - and yes I know I started with 3/4 of BI but it was just a risk I was willing to take lol.

and thanks for the insightful advice NS. Will play with these things in mind and have a next update at the end of this week.

Another thing I'd suggest, get pokerstove and plug stuff into that...I really started getting better when i started realizing how close certain hands/situations are. You'll see that your not as far ahead/behind as you'd think

If you have that little in your bankroll, you can easily just shortstack 2nl. I had $18 on stars and decided I was going to 12table shortstacking the micros in order to get a roll back together and I'm up to about $300 now. Normally I wouldn't say anything good about shortstacking but your roll is so short that it's going to be a lot safer to keep more money behind in case you get coolered.

Yeah I feel uneasy playing 5NL with just what I have now (just over $20)
Playing multiple tables of 2NL sounds a lot safer but then again who knows I could just totally eff up and lose everything =/ unless I play ridiculously tight and aggressive when need be?

Ionno, I'm still trying to process what Giga stated in the above post, in my head
But how long did it take you to get up?