Adventures in finding my specialty...

I truly believe and have learned that winning online poker players are ones who specialize in a particular game. They play only that game and move up in stakes as they become better players and increase their bankrolls. You find this to be true with the vast majority of winning, successful pros and semi-pros. They may play some of the Sunday MTTS but Monday through Friday they grind their regular game.

Why is this true? Because by specializing you learn your chosen game backward and forward. You become familiar with the regular players and the structure and you hone your skills until you are great at that one game. It's very difficult to bounce from one type game to another and get really good at any of them so I'm trying to figure out what I want to specialize in and my next few blogs will be about my adventures in finding my niche in the crazy world of online poker.

Up until now I have bounced around trying to find a game I like and that I do well in with very mixed results. I thought I preferred multi-table sit-n-goes but the variance is very high and they take forever, even the turbo ones. I have never played a lot of 9 man single table sit-n-goes but I seem to be 1/2 way decent at them so I am going to play $6.50 9 man turbos for awhile and see how it goes. I will play about 200 - 250 of them and see what my win-rate and ROI are at the end of that and if they haven't caused me to go broke by that point I will stick with them until I've played 1000 of them and see how I did. If I've lost too much and haven't done well with them at the 250 mark I may switch to something else or drop down in stakes.

I will make weekly or twice weekly posts about my progress or lack of progress and I trudge ahead in my quest to find my specialty.

So wish me luck in my quests for specialization.

Don't have much to say except thank God I seem to finally be running better. I took down the first 45 man sng this month tonight and ran deep in the 3.30 4 max MTT.

I found some great poker quotes and thought I'd post some here:

There are few things that are so unpardonably neglected in our country as poker. The upper class knows very little about it. Now and then you find ambassadors who have sort of a general knowledge of the game, but the ignorance of the people is fearful. Why, I have known clergymen, good men, kind-hearted, liberal, sincere, and all that, who did not know the meaning of a "flush." It is enough to make one ashamed of the species. ~Mark Twain

Poker is the game closest to the western conception of life, where life and thought are recognized as intimately combined, where free will prevails over philosophies of fate or of chance, where men are considered moral agents and where - at least in the short run - the important thing is not what happens but what people think happens. ~John Luckacs

I believe in poker the way I believe in the American Dream. Poker is good for you. It enriches the soul, sharpens the intellect, heals the spirit, and - when played well, nourishes the wallet. ~Lou Krieger

Whether he likes it or not, a man’s character is stripped at the poker table; if the other players read him better than he does, he has only himself to blame. Unless he is both able and prepared to see himself as others do, flaws and all, he will be a loser in cards, as in life. ~Anthony Holden

You have it in your power to turn a bad-beat around simply by realizing this simple truth: The more bad beats you encounter, the luckier you are. It's a sign that you are playing against opponents who continually take the worst of it, and if you can't beat someone who always takes the worst of it, you can't beat anyone. ~Lou Krieger

Most of the money you'll win at poker comes not from the brilliance of your own play, but from the ineptitude of your opponents. ~Lou Krieger

There's opportunity in poker.... If Horace Greeley were alive today, his advice wouldn't be "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country." Instead, he'd point to that deck of cards on table and say, "Shuffle up and deal. ~Lou Krieger

Hope anyone reading this (all few of you) enjoyed this.

Life is like poker, both deal you bad beats...

and you have two choices either suck it up and persevere or give up! I choose in both cases to persevere! I've often said poker isn't for the depressed or bi-polar person. The ups and downs are huge and they can really get to you if you don't have the right mental attitude. How do you manage to blow it off? Volume, volume and more volume! Why? Because the more tables you play the less you notice the variance and more your volume makes up for it.

I've been playing 3 to 4 tables and thought I needed to see them all so I tiled them. I am beginning to think I should stack them. The benefits of stacking are numerous.

1. I make plays and then before I can watch myself getting sucked out on another table pops in front of that one so I miss the suckout and using table ninja the table just closes and I don't have to suffer over the beat.
2. I can play at least 6 tables thus increasing my volume and reducing the overall variance.
3. With more going on I am less likely to make stupid plays out of sheer boredom.

So I'm going to try stacking and see how it goes.

I am also in a prop bet to play 150 45 man games this month and whoever makes the most profit over the 150 games wins. This should make me stick to one game for a while instead of bouncing around so much.

Okay now I'll talk about April results. April was pretty awful!

April Goals:

Play 100 27 man MTSNGS with a decent profit and ROI not quite
Play 100 other MTSNGS with a decent profit and ROI - yes
Play 100 STSNGS with a decent profit and ROI - yes
Play 15 MTTs - yes
Maintain silver star status - yes
Study 10 hours per week - not quite
Review at least one hand history per day - nope failed miserably

Barely broke even for April.

I'll do a post for May soon but that's all for now folks