Hanging ‘em up

I think it’s time to put an end to my days as full ring LHE grinder.

This decision has nothing to do with a downswing or running bad, I’m actually up a bit lately, but mostly due to the fact that these games are just plain terrible nowadays. And for that, I blame Rakeback.

Before Rakeback was widely introduced to a bunch of smaller networks (Prima and Ipoker come to mind), you’d easily be able to sit at a full ring 5-10 table filled with donks where 6-7 handed flops were the norm. Hard to NOT make money in that situation. But now that Rakeback is an industry standard, Weak tight grinders are usually hanging out in those waters making most of these sites barely profitable. You’re pretty much looking at a bunch of nut peddlers trading around their money while extracting a tiny profit from a 28%-35% rakeback deal. Not cool.

After grinding in these for just about a year, I really feel like I’m due for somewhat of a change.

The word around town is that the crap players crave the shorthanded action since it’s faster and they get to play more hands. Which would also mean that these fish are basically tripping over themselves making dumb mistakes in the hopes of winning big pots. I think this is where I need to be right now. My game is improving, I can feel it. I’ve especially made progress in my hand reading ability. Playing more hands and seeing more flops should definitely allow me to progress to the next level in that regard.

So what now? I’ll probably take the rest of the month off from cash games and pad up the roll with the various casino bonuses around. I will also be studying the shorthanded game to make sure I am well prepared when I make my moves in there.

I’ll also focus some more on tournaments. Believe it or not, I actually cashed in my last three online MTT’S. No big scores yet, but I pretty much made the money without breaking a sweat. It’s crazy how much of a difference winning hands where you are significant favourite when the money goes in can improve your results. It’s also a matter of the various adjustments that I’ve made in my game, mostly making things happen in the middle stages of the tournament instead of waiting for them to happen for me. I’m no longer depending on good cards to get anywhere in those things, I just focus on abusing the living crap out of the players and go from there. I still need to tone it down and pick some of my pots better but at least I’m on the right track, my game is progressing.