Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Hourly Wage - Limit/NL Hold'em
I have been meaning to make a post about my hourly wage and playing limit holdem versus no limit. Since I have half an hour until Myia and I go on a tour of a local brewery here in Vancouver (Granville Island Brewery) I thought I would do this post.
As it stands now after 119 hours of limit and no limit play (27 hour of limit, 92 of no limit) my hourly wage sits at +$39.83. Now separating the hourly wage for each game: +$55.04 at NL and -$12.00 at Limit. Obviously from an objective point of view one would say you are better at NL. I think that that is the case as well, but I also am not naive enough to think that I have the skill set to beat higher limit NL games as of now (altough I think I could beat the 3/6NL game at Riverrock just not sure if I could handle the variance yet). I am only play 1/2NL where the competition is generally weak and new to the game, but on the other hand I have booked 19 straight winning sessions so I don't know. At the 10/20 limit game with 20/40 full kill I had 3 winning and 2 losing sessions. Unfortunately, the second losing session was a -$1,000 swing where I couldn't catch a break for the first $600 and then played bad to lose the rest. In that game every bet and just one or two mistakes can mean losing a session when you should have come out ahead. When I first started playing it I really believed I could beat it and looking back and thinking of the hands they play in the positions they play them in it should be an easy game to beat. However, you have to make hands and have the emotional stability to withstand the variance attributed to having so many calling stations and random hands being played in the game. That negative swing really kicked me in the balls and I have unfortunately been too shell-shocked to go back. Plus I am making $55 an hour playing NL with far less variance.
I really don't know if I could beat that game for 3BB an hour ($60 an hour), which would make it more profitable to play then NL. I probably have too many holes in my limit game to the point I am probably 1-1.5 bets an hour, but then again I didn't play long enough to really see my expectation in the game. It was hard when I first started playing live as I only had 20 hours max of experience with obviously 3 years of online behind that. With limit I guess you just can't win as often and I have heard people say that is true - maybe I am off in saying that not sure yet. It could be true for the NL game as well, but I really do think I am at least +$40 and probably +$50 in that game in the long run. The other thing with playing limit is that it really is such a grind. Playing optimally in that game which is a lot of nofoldem poker is just waiting for hands, and playing live means those hands come up one or two maybe three times an hour unless you are on some kind of rush. NL is more fun because I can play around 30%+ of the hands in correct position, correct price, etc, etc in the 1/2 game at RiverRock as they just aren't good enough to make many good moves against you and will constantly pay you off.
I think what I am trying to say is that I have had a lot more fun playing NL this summer then Limit. Maybe it's because of my results or maybe it's because of the game. I wrote this blog as a mix of my thoughts on the two games. Now it's off to the tour.
-Kirk (idareyouAA)
