I had a good session at pokerstars yesterday. I know it must seem odd that I win virtually every hand there. You might think: “Is he just trying to pump himself up?”. Well, there is that.

The truth has more to do with the fact that I only order hand histories when I can’t see my opponents cards. One of the many nice things about online poker is that you can request to see a hand that makes it to the river but isn’t tabled. Of course, when I lose a showdown I nearly always see my opponents cards. There are of course exceptions in multi-way pots. I only have easy access to the hands which I’ve won and my opponent didn’t have to show.

Yeah, have I walked through the bowels of society to rid the world of players possessed. Seriously though. What does possess player to play the way they do? Ok, check-raising the turn with 88 when there are three overcards isn’t the worst play in the world. And calling the three bet isn’t totally nuts. But when the four-flush hits on the river and you have none? Well I guess a rivered set might just be good enough one in 12 times there. Either that or my opponent just got a new gig. Be gone! In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit!

You never know what goes through the mind of your opponent when you play online poker. He may be drunk or on tilt for all we know, but sometimes they really make amazingly bad play, and the key is to have the patience to wait for these golden opportunities to make money playing online poker.

The real big area that I miss this information isn’t in the play once on the table. It’s when selecting a table. I took advantage of IdleMiner for FullTilt and it would run for hours a day and I have a huge database on all the players at my level – and I always mine a few tables at the level above me as well. So very rarely would I sit down at a 6max tables and not have at least 200 hands on at least 5 of the players sitting there. This is HUGE when quickly evaluating the fishyness of a table.

My practice was, if I were playing $10NL on FullTilt, was to open all say 20 tables at the level. Let it run for like 5 or 10 hands and let Holdem Manager update and get going. Then I would filter through the tables by hand and look at the basic table stats – and then the rating on each player – and then lastly on the size of the stacks.

Any table with a VPIP under 30 was immediately closed down. Any table with a PFR% over 10% was closed down. Then of those tables that were left I looked at the ones with the highest average pot. At these tables I would look at what ratings I had for each player at the table. If I saw a 6max table with 4 weak players with at least 1 buy-in I would be mashing the button to get on the waiting list. Generally I didn’t mind if there was one other player that the stats told me was dangerous and a good player. It’s easy enough to avoid these players and still make money off the weak players. But any more then one generally and I would take that table out of the running.

Now be careful. Just because you see a fish – or two – or three at a table doesn’t mean it’s worth sitting at. If these guys have real short stacks you might want to just move on and find the next one. Why? Because I find that by the time I actually get at the table (assuming I have to get on the wait list), I will more then likely be replacing one of these fish from his seat. And two there are plenty of other players like me that are like vultures monitoring the tables and they will spot this juicy table too and many times I find myself 20 minutes later sitting at a table full of predators because we quickly sat down and busted the fish. To me sometimes it’s just not worth it.

So that’s my general algorithm for table selection. But not having these statistics available to me has really hampered my ability to find good tables on PokerStars. Generally I sit down and it takes me at least 30 minutes to even figure out if I have a good table or a bad table. The good news is as I play more, I get more and more statistics on the players around me and this problem should slowly lessen.

Back in the grind

Yet despite that, I managed to grind out a nice win for the bankroll. I walked away from the two tables after just under two hours with a net of +$11. Not too bad doubling up my buy-in in 2 hours.

Not where I want to be – but on the right track. Like I said I don’t even feel like I played great cards. It was just a grind out session taking down pots mostly with aggression. Hey maybe that’s the secret. It definitely could have been more profitable, especially since the two tables were never even full tables. One was usually always like 8-9 players, and the other one was usually 5-6 so I had to loosen up a bit more on that one.

I am starting to feel my game adjusting. Not really “my game”, but I need to adapt my so-called poker game to these tables. It has been a while since I played this low and I needed to tweak my poker game a bit. Hopefully I don’t wreck what it was. But hey that is the goal of this experiment, blow up my old game and rebuild it from scratch.

Not bad to take a $5 initial bankroll and to turn it into 13x’s that in 13 hours of play. That’s basically doubling up the 5$ buy in each hour of play. Especially when you consider I had a couple problems trying to find my stride and adapt my game. Hopefully now it will start to snowball and I can get on a steady roll.

Good luck to you.