Thinking about what to discuss in tonight's post, I thought about how my play has changed of late. It was a little surprising for me to realize that I haven't bet the pot in a hand in quite a long while. I guess I've unconsciously come to the realization that while betting the pot is not the best strategy for maximizing one's profit, it's an admirable strategy for losing large amounts of chips. If you have the best hand and bet the pot, it's likely your opponents will fold, and you won't have extracted any extra chips out of them. If you're only hoping you have the best hand, bet the pot, and get a caller or two, it's more likely than not that you don't actually have the best hand. Holding back from such a large bet helps in both situations. In the first one, you might actually extract more chips from your opponents. In the second one, you end up losing less chips than you would have if you'd bet the pot.
So I'm adding another rule of thumb to my growing list -- bet the pot rarely, if ever. I'm coining this strategy "the beauty of caution". You saw it here first :-)
Tonight I settled for less than double my starting stake again. As I said last time, as long as I'm avoiding losing sessions I'm happy.
I discovered today that one reason my Site Meter stats were all zeroes was that there was a little piece of HTML initialization I had to do to get them going. I've done that, so now the numbers will be telling me the awful truth.
Final winning hand of the night: trip jacks, to the tune of $1,260.
delta: $950
balance: $269,841
Showing posts with label Site Meter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Site Meter. Show all posts
Friday, January 22, 2010
Thursday, January 21, 2010
New philosophy
Thanks to yesterday's result, I have a new philosophy -- I'll now consider ending my sessions without doubling my initial stake, if I've played well enough. Of course, playing well enough usually entails coming out on the plus side of the ledger.
I felt I had good instincts tonight, and that I maximized the value of the pots I won by not betting too much. My best hand was a set of queens; that pot was worth $1,140, not too shabby at a $5/$10 table.
It's clearly better to steadily win small amounts than to be on the seesaw I started on about ten sessions ago. If your trend looks like a seesaw, that's not a good long-term strategy. I'm in this for the long haul! I've made various estimates of how long it will take me to earn one play million; my most conservative estimates have me making $100K a year. So I should be able to reach my goal in 7.3 more years, before the turn of the next decade.
I took the step of signing up with the free blog statistics site called Site Meter today, to see if anyone's actually reading this blog. I've only told four people about it so far -- my wife, one of my sisters-in-law, my father, and my oldest friend. The initial stats are deafeningly silent -- zeroes across the board. I hope to change that!
delta: $670
balance: $268,891
I felt I had good instincts tonight, and that I maximized the value of the pots I won by not betting too much. My best hand was a set of queens; that pot was worth $1,140, not too shabby at a $5/$10 table.
It's clearly better to steadily win small amounts than to be on the seesaw I started on about ten sessions ago. If your trend looks like a seesaw, that's not a good long-term strategy. I'm in this for the long haul! I've made various estimates of how long it will take me to earn one play million; my most conservative estimates have me making $100K a year. So I should be able to reach my goal in 7.3 more years, before the turn of the next decade.
I took the step of signing up with the free blog statistics site called Site Meter today, to see if anyone's actually reading this blog. I've only told four people about it so far -- my wife, one of my sisters-in-law, my father, and my oldest friend. The initial stats are deafeningly silent -- zeroes across the board. I hope to change that!
delta: $670
balance: $268,891
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