So a topic that has been on my mind lately is the idea of game selection and multi-limit playing. It’s weird how many players only play one specific limit during a given week. A friend of mine opened my eyes a few years back when he was playing 2/4NL one day and 10/20NL the next. I was confused for the first bit, asking myself “why would he do that? wouldn’t $200 seem like chicken shit if he was playing 5/10 the next day?”
The answer is pretty simple. With the way poker is today, regulars need to be flexible in their play, both in game limits and games themselves (many have branched over to PLO). You’ll often hear of mid stakes regulars who play 5/10 and 2/4 in the same day (or higher and lower depending). Take shots when games are good (ie. a fish is playing and you’re adequately rolled), drop down when they suck. One thing I personally can’t do is play multiple limits at the same time (ie. 1 5/10NL table open and then a 50 PLO game or something of that nature)…maybe just not good at multitasking enough.
Playing multiple limits is great psychologically as well. If you’re running bad, dropping down for a few days should be fairly obvious- grinding it out at normal limits with tougher opponents (than the lower staked) can lead to a prolonging downswing…but going down a limit and crushing can lead to good results and (even more importantly) resounding confidence. Today I played some 50NL for an hour and crushed.
Egos die fast in poker…sure everyone is cocky and arrogant, but those who refuse to accept that there are better opponents (and that their play(s) can be suspect)- they get their just deserts soon enough. Everyone eats their slice of humble pie at one point or another in their poker career.
In other news, I finally filtered alot of my PLO results over the past year or so. Before my monster downer, I was up probably $25k in maybe 80k hands of mainly 1/2 PLO. After the downer (probably ~10k in mostly 1/2) the results obviously aren’t as nice. Pretty much all on my damn desktop too, wish I could just scrap this piece of shit computer (rigged computer) for some of that money back.