I think the moment has come for me to make an honest review on why am I experiencing problems with my NLHE game recently.
The last two months have been very controversial for me. I was working on a lot of improvements to my game and trying to incorporate them simultaneously. This resulted in multiple downswings and slightly better than break-ever results ~ 1bb/100.
In this post I will try to look in more details to the changes that I have made to my usually “nitty” game .
Let me start by saying FTP is a different business. Adjusting to the games in FTP has been a challenge. There are a few reasons why FTP is a tough place to play. First, it is the second biggest room allowed for the US people, which means that many of the US players are playing there. It offers rakeback, so many of the grinders moved there. On the small stakes like 100NL and 200NL is full of regulars that know what they are doing, so table selection becomes important and playing against regulars becomes important. I never put much thought in these components of the game. There are many “nitty” good players and LAGs that easily let hands go, so set mining for profit is already not a good formula.
The 200NL games are different than the 100NL. This is the first level where you start seeing professional grinders. Also 3betting, 4betting, squeezing is kinda light and tables with 3-4 regulars are common. All in all, it gets tougher
- I have been experimenting with 3-betting, 4betting, squeezing and stacking off light.
As I said, 3btting and 4betting is lighter which means that I needed to start 3betting LAG players more IP, 3betting light CO and Button openers. Of course people has been also doing it against me, which lead to the fact that I have to 4bet bluff more often to protect myself. These dynamics of the preflop ranges leads to the situations where stacking preflop can go as light as TT+,AQ+. This increases the variance for whenever I misread the person’s range or he just happens to be on the top of his range the money are going in very bad.
- I have been opening up my game
The better the players you play against, the less likely is it to stack them when you have a good hand if you have been playing nitty. The regulars are not stacking often TPTK to a 16/12 guy in raised pot. Even more so against 13/9, which is kinda what was a great style for NL50. So in order to get paid I have to open up more pots, leading to being 3bet more light and creating more 3bet-pot-situations for my TPTK. This of course means that you get involved in much more raised and 3bet pots with marginal hands. In these cases I have to continue with the aggression, so that you can protect my monsters and overpairs. However, if my standard line with marginal and air hands used to be cbet and give up if called, I was very easy to play against by some of the better players on this level, which leads me to my next point
- I have been incorporating double barrels,check/raise bluffs, thin river bet, more turn aggression, lines to tackle casual floaters and other non ABC lines.
This is where most of my new leaks come from, it seems that I am always choosing the wrong moment to bluff. And it seems that I am still not very good at which specific board textures are good to double barrel. Also it seems that many of the regulars are not giving up as easy as me and require at least two streets aggression to give up marginal hands.
The problem with thin river value bets are that often I run into better hand and then I feel like I made a mistake. Especially since the variance of this play is so big, it is not trivial to estimate whether I am doing a good job or a bad job. Also higher turn aggression leaves you open to creating big pots with marginal hands against passive players. The long-term success of these plays is based on the accuracy of the estimation of the opponents range. In order to estimate the opponents range, you have to have stronger read than VPIP,PFR,AF,NH.
- I have been making more read-based plays, based on notes and additional PAHUD stats.
This is something that I am sure I am not doing very well. Often, I think one level lower than my opponent against the good thinking players or two levels higher against the weak players that I sometimes give to much respect to. Both of these situations lead to terrible results. More notes and more stats have been making some non standard plays look good against certain players, however when these players are aware of their image they use it to their advantage.
- Multitabling, tilt issues, stop-loss
And now we come to the last and most important components of my break-even months.
Adding all this variance-increasing elements to my game lead to swings that I was not used to and thus lead to a few days of mad monkey tilt. Also I was trying to multitable 9 tables which seems to be very different from my normal 7 tables. As a last component I have been trying to stop after losing 3 buyins for a day, but deviated from this rule twice which lead to crazy 7-9 buyin drop downs. Basically had I only stuck to 7 tables, no tilt and strict stop-loss I would have had at least 5k$ more. I guess it is high time I start sticking to the discipline I am talking so much about.
- I have been working on my PLO game
As additional fun factor I have been trying to bean PLO50 and for the moment I just cannot. I am doing great at PLO25, but PLO50 is just another world for me. However currently I play PLO only for fun as for the last 4 months I have like 10k hands, but keeping -5bb/100 is not so great 
As conclusion I include the graph of my NL200 adventure
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