Week 5

After another good week my bankroll stands at $223. I’ve moved up to 10NL and show a $35 profit over 1300 hands for a win rate of 13BB/100. I’ve successfully stepped up the aggression and am now playing proper TAG poker: 15/10/3 at 10NL as opposed to 18/5/1.7 at 2NL. This transition may account for my showing a loss at 5NL – I played 900 hands last week for a small (3BB/100) profit but I’m still showing a slight loss over a total of 3K hands.

I’m still tinkering with my ring game starting hand selection but I’m pretty clear now what I’m doing preflop. The main change post flop has been relentless c-betting – I raise it up before the flop and then bet out. Simple but effective. I’m thinking this is going to need a good bit of refinement at higher levels.

I’ve played quite a few STTs in the last week: 46 at $5 for a profit of $134 (53% ROI) and 27 at $10 for a loss of $81. I’m still developing my STT strategy, currently I’m playing TAG for the first 3 levels and then change up through the gears to LAG against opponents based on their stack size and degree of tightness. This basic strategy works well for $5 games but I’ve struggled a bit at $10.

When I moved up to $10 I played a set of 4 games, finishing out of the money in all of them. My bankroll took a severe dent, dropping from $210 to $165 and the lower bounds of moving down to 5NL/$5 STT. I played $5 STTs until my bankroll was back up to $200 and then switched back to $10 games. This has happened a couple of times – I’m using my licence to print money at $5 to fund my education at $10. I am improving and it shouldn’t be too long before I’m regularly beating the $10 games. I’ve been 4 tabling at $5 and this works well for me. However, at $10 I’ve found I play better 3 tabling. In future I intend to 2 table when I move up a level until I know I can beat the new level and then add more tables if appropriate.

Over the coming week I want to crack $10 STTs and continue to show a good profit at 10NL, it would be good to maintain a win rate of over 10BB/100. Last weeks aims were to show a profit at 5NL/$5 STTs was met, particularly with the STTs.