How do you know you're improving?

[ShatnerPants]

I've been playing a few cash games, pretty aimlessly, and I'm beginning to feel comfortable playing cash, rather than tournaments.

But rather than being a losing player, the long term aim is to turn myself into a more steady profit centre. I'm not talking turning pro or anything, but it would be nice to take the Mrs out for a meal every few months, that sort of profit.

I put £25 into Titan, final tabled a couple of MTTs to win a couple of hundred dollars, and have started winning a few SNGs. I've taken the £25 back out, and I'm left with about £150.

However, my cash games are showing an overall loss, I fear. Last month my figures were; Played 1842 hands lost £3.95

This month has started rather nicely in comparison. Tonight's figures; Played 336 hands won £20.57

So now is the moment to set the standards.

I'm now going to take grinding seriously (by my own rather pathetic standards).

I can play 3 tables of $0.05/$0.10, 9 handed at once. I can't do all the maths of putting villain on a range, and calculate odds to call etc.

What I can do is play position, and c-bet pretty relentlessly.  Sometimes it works !!

Any tips on how best to proceed, or judge my progress.

Or anything at all, really

 

Cheers

[Pugwashed]

The main way I can tell if I'm improving is by looking back at the way I used to approach spots and things I used to do and understanding why it was bad. In a years time I'd be a lot happier if I could look back and think about how bad I was now than think about how good I was now (if that makes sense)

That probably might not be very helpful. I think quantifying those kind of things isn't always easy but keep trying to get better and hope that you can look back at how you played a few months or a year ago and really understand why what you were doing wrong was bad

[tight4better]

It might be better to play less tables and then start to put your opponents on ranges and value bet/bluff accordingly, as you get better doing it add more tables until you reach your wall and you're showing a profit consistently. Any hands or spots that come up, post on here

[zerofive]

I've been playing a few cash games, pretty aimlessly, and I'm beginning to feel comfortable playing cash, rather than tournaments.

But rather than being a losing player, the long term aim is to turn myself into a more steady profit centre. I'm not talking turning pro or anything, but it would be nice to take the Mrs out for a meal every few months, that sort of profit.

I put £25 into Titan, final tabled a couple of MTTs to win a couple of hundred dollars, and have started winning a few SNGs. I've taken the £25 back out, and I'm left with about £150.

However, my cash games are showing an overall loss, I fear. Last month my figures were; Played 1842 hands lost £3.95

This month has started rather nicely in comparison. Tonight's figures; Played 336 hands won £20.57

Okay, first of all I'd like to reiterate the point that Pugwashed made. Sometimes you can be stuck in a rut, you might not have a winning session for a while, you might think you've made no improvements over the last x amount of time. In these ruts, we can look back and think something like "I've lost £20 over the last 1k hands, I'm not improving at all," but it's in these ruts we really get to see how much we have improved. Anyone can flop set over set and win a chunk of money, but if you can look at your £20 downswing and say something like, "one year ago I'd have lost £100 playing those same hands, and now I only lost £20," then you're improving.

The fact that you're not playing poker right now and you're asking questions about it means you're working on your A-game and as such, you're improving.

It's a bit of a cliché to say so, but it is true: MTTs and cash games are different beasts entirely. You need to employ two different strategies to tame each one. The problem for anyone who is not playing poker full-time is volume. I can look back over a week and say "I lost $50 playing tournaments online and I lost £400 playing cash games at my local casino, maybe I should look for a different job." While that might be good advice for me anyway what I need to do is look back over a month or two months or a year and say "I've made $200 playing MTTs online, but I've not really played that many and I've not really had a deep run in any big ones. I've made £5k playing cash games, despite going on a £400 downswing that one week, that's certainly enough to take the missus out for lobster!"

To take a look at your figures in particular, I honestly don't know much about MTT variance, but I would say to have made money without having to deposit again from £25 you have run above average. That's not to say you're not good, or not improving. Even Jake Cody can go 25 tournaments without making the cash. It's hard to judge how much you're improving by just playing tournaments. I'd suggest if you want to play a lot of hands and see a lot of different situations with a lot of big blinds, then you should be playing cash games to judge your improvement.

Your cash game figures are fine, but your sample size is small. £16.62 at £0.05/0.10 over 2k hands is a good win rate. We tend to look at win rates online as bb/100 (that's big blinds per one hundred hands) so your winrate here is 8.31bb/100. This figure is going to fluctuate, but less and less so the more hands you play. So even if this figure goes down, it doesn't mean you're not improving. Let's say you play one hand of poker and you get AA and beat KK and you win a full buyin. You are winning 100bb over 1 hand, which is 10,000bb/100 and that is quite obviously not a sustainable winrate, so we wouldn't be upset to see that figure go down. What you do achieve by playing more hands is a more accurate figure. Your winrate will probably start to look more like 4bb/100, but when you crank out 1,000 hands in a night then that's £4 a night. Not only that, but as you play more you will inherently be a better player and you will be able to move up stakes with your new-found fortune and 4bb/100 over 1k hands becomes £10, and then £20.

So, in short, see how you're doing after 10k hands and that ought to give you a good idea of how you'll do for the next 10k hands. Then see how you did over 100k hands and compare that to your previous 100k hands. You'll notice a steady improvement. Any time you get stuck in a hand and think afterwards, "that was a key moment, I'm really not sure whether I made the correct decision or even what the correct decision was," there are plenty of wizards on these boards that will be more than happy to help you.

In the meantime, this ought to be a very useful resource. http://www.pokerology.com/poker-school/texas-holdem/beginner/ By virtue of the fact that you played poker ever means you can probably skip module 1. But module 2 covers basic odds and statistics, identifying personalities at the table, and covers some basic mistakes that beginners make.

Hope this helps/wasn't too condescending/wasn't too long. Good luck mate.

[kinboshi]

Good post Sean.

[ShatnerPants]

Good post Sean.

And then some...

 

Plenty to work on. Because I can watch 3 tables quite comfortably I don't want to reduce that atm - it doesn't mean I'm making 3 x the mistakes, I'm just making them 3 x as quickly.

The first thing I noticed this a.m. was that I was winning small pots with my good hands, and losing bigger pots with my marginals / bluffs. I think that will be my first learning target.

When to bet and bet sizing.

Last night and again this morning I was pretty poor when I first sat down, then as I got the feel for the other players I seemed to catch up a bit more. I think I need to understand MY betting patterns more and so I can make better decisions based on 'fact', rather than relying on 'feel'

Does that make sense?

Thanks for the support guys, I already feel more accomplished, just by these few posts.

Cheers as always

 

[tight4better]

Good post Sean.

[muckthenuts]

Post on pha. if you can look back on your posting history in 6 months time and think wow i used to talk a load of shit then thats a great sign

[sedds]

Hi,

Alot of it is to do with immersing yourself into poker as much as possible, reading good resources, talking to other players, hours at the table and repeating the process. Obviously sometimes it feels a little 1 step forward 2 steps back and sometimes new concepts can be confusing, but its important to trust that your brain will catch up . One of the things that greatly accelerated my learning of the game was actively targeting some of my weaknesses and 'practicing' them for a few weeks at a time. ie. I used to be a super suspicious player when it came to call downs, so i forced myself to always fold when facing heat in any situation that wasn't a clear cut shove/call down. Now this sounds a little counter intuitive when its comes to poker - ie. each situaton is so unique, but my level of ability at the time and emotional attachment to hands always gave me a bias towards calling, so a little time spent 'folding too much' made me much more comfortable with the act of making folds. I also did the same with stuff like my 3/4/5bet preflop game to become more comfortable in upping the aggression.
I believe the more targeted approach can help you find that 'sweet spot' of how much to raise/call/fold in any given situation alot faster than a more general approach where we tend to repeat our previous mistakes again and again once the initial pain of losing the pot is gone.
Finally don't beat yourself up too much about any mistakes you do make - everyone who is good has made many mistakes in order to find out what doesn't work, be patient and enjoy yourself, gl!