the Switch to Cash Games

so, for a long time I didn't play any poker because I was unable to deposit money online.

sometime in the summer of '08, I decided to play some freerolls on pokerstars.  I joined a site called railbirds and they offered all kinds of daily freerolls as long as you were an active member.

Railbirds is a site that wants to be like 2+2 but I found that the members that contributed frequently there were either purposefully giving bad advice, or simply did not have much knowledge about higher levels of poker theory.  I'm sure that site has some very good players who are members, but maybe the draw of the freerolls brought a "lower quality" player.  I know that I certainly wasn't someone who was at a high level at that time, so I don't want to make it seem like I knew more than them at the time, but I did know that something was lacking in the strategy department.

In November of '08, I had a few real dollars in my Stars account because of the freerolls.  It was at this time that I started lurking in the micro cash game forum on 2p2 and saw that people were making at decent amount of money regularly at limits of like 25nl.  Thinking that I was better than I was, I figured it would take no time at all to move up to those levels and above, so I sat down at the 2nl tables and started grinding.

Looking back at some of the posts I made at the time, I can't believe how much I didn't know.  But, I did win slowly but surely enough to move up to 5nl.  I had a lot of patience at the time, I guess.

Sometime during 5nl, I finally admitted to myself that I really did suck at cash game play.  I started reading every single piece of strategy advice I could find.  Stuff by Pokey was killer, of course, but there was a lot of good stuff out there.  The mods at the micro forum instituted a Concept of the Week Series... COTW for short.  This was about the time that I realized how many nuances there were to cash game poker.  Every week, some reg would make a post about a certain subject, such as "How to play AK"  "3-bettting" 'Table Selecting" and others.

For a full list... concept-week-schedule

I began to look forward to these and would read them at least once every other day during the week.  I would also go back and re-read about concepts that I hadn't fully grasped.

My biggest break-through came when I met a friend through a sweat session.  (a sweat session is an online meeting where someone watches you play while seeing your hole cards and then comments about what he/she thinks you did correctly or incorrectly during the session... they are not there to tell you what to do while you're playing, for what it's worth).

Anyways, through that session, my friend told me that I needed to stop thinking that everyone was always "messing" with me.  I would often think that every raise was a bluff and that I needed to shove all-in against every perceived bluff situation.

At this moment, about a year after the beginning of my cash game journey, I am firmly a "25nl Reg."  I play consistent, solid poker at 25nl and I am a 2.7BB/100 winner over the 55k hands I've played there.  This month, November of 2009, I played 15k hands and am finally running over 5BB/100.  My volume isn't exactly where I want it to be, but I had about 10 days this month were I did not play at all.

Also, I did get some coaching from Mpeth and SplitSuit of 2p2 and it helped greatly.  If you ever are looking for a good coach, both of these guys do a great leak finder service that will help you re-tool your game.

splitsuit.com/leakfinder

I am currently rolled for 50nl and sometime in the next week or two I will be taking shots and looking to move up to the next level of play.