Another decent night at the good ‘ol 50/1 table. Up 8BB over two hours for a rate of 4BB/hr. Now, 4BB/hr is pretty damn good I know, and I’m doing my best to really look at it in terms of BB and not money, but at the end of the night when you look at what you walk away with and see a paltry +$8 it does get frustrating. So what did I do? I thought I’d try to boost it a bit by playing a ridiculously juiced 5+1 SNG. I ended up fifth and out of the money. I just don’t have the NL betting style figured out yet. I was able to double up once with QQ, but near the end I made a dumb ass bet trying to represent a high card while HU with the medium stack. I didn’t bet the pot, but rather about 2/3 of it which for him was an easy call. It was one of those “DAMNIT!” things that as soon as I hit the “Bet” button I knew it was wrong. Anyway, still ended up 2BB for the night, but it was not satisfying at all.
The upside was that I had a good chat with Anisotropy during the last half of my ring game and my tourney (and a couple of his own, he fared much better than I did in the tourneys). Uh…so blame him! 
Sean and I got talking about the boring grind that is 50/1. I’m frustrated, he’s frustrated, we’re all frustrated. Not that on the whole we can’t beat the game, but depending on your starting bankroll, it can take forever to move up. Yes, I could take $400 out of my bank account right now and not have it affect my overall balances and have the correct bankroll to sit at 1/2. Should I? I don’t know. I’m not sure my wife would be too thrilled at it though. I would love to do it just to get to the point where there is some visible return on winning.
Scott just talked about how boring limit is compared to NL. I can see his point now that I’ve played a bit of NL. I am still going to concentrate on the ring games if for no other reason than that ring games are more plentiful in the “real” world, at least outside of tourneys. I can go to any casino that has poker and they’ll be spreading a ring game. Yes, limit may be more mechanical whereas NL is more of an art, but there are still plenty of people who cannot do basic mechanical limit play, so it is still profitable. I do like playing the tourneys periodically just to break up the monotany, and if you can get in the money, they are a decent way to build up the bankroll while you’re at the low limits, but I’m going to concentrate on the ring games for now.
During my disastrous January run, I dropped back down to playing one table. Now that things are back on track I’m going to go back to two. hdouble suggests that to TFG in the comments of the above mentioned entry. I was doing fine playing two tables for a while, then things fell apart. I’ve mentioned before that I think I just started playing poorly and was chasing things too much. I also had not really read up on post-flop strategy. While I obviously still have a ton to learn, I feel much better about my post-flop play. Therefore, starting tonight I’m going back up to two tables.
Another big issue with the slow move is the amount of time I’ve had available to play. Over the last few weeks I have not had as much time as I’d like to play. This directly affects your play. You can read all the books and articles that you want, but until you actually play and see some of the situations in “real life”, you don’t always understand what you need to do. I had that revalation about flush draws after reading Carson and then zipping through TTH and playing flush draws. I now see how they “work”, but I still did not “believe” it until I played it a few times. Maybe that’s just me, but I think that if you want to be consistently successful at poker, you must play poker. Due to some family issues over the last few weeks, I’ve been pretty fried come 9pm (CST) or so and have just not felt like playing. Things are coming around on the home front, and my class this quarter is at the point where we’re supposed to be spending most of our time working on our final projects, so I’ve got time now. I’m going to concentrate on trying to play a couple of hours a night for the foreseeable future. This should get me a large number of hands over two tables and hopefully get me enough to start playing a 1/2 table soon.
On a side note, good ‘ol hdouble pointed me to an Indian casino that appears to be just a short distance from Big Bear (my CA geography is hazy though, but when you compare the map (the “High Desert” one) to the one at bigbear.com it appears to be pretty close) where I’ll be staying for a week at the end of March. He talks of very loose 2/4 games. Hmmm… 