game type

Kannon

hi all.
i'm a beginner (been playing about a month). i'm wondering what type of game is best to play at the beginning. i've been playing €2 and €5 Sit n Go tournaments since i started, but these just seem to develop into someone going all-in every hand and whoever hits on the flop wins which can seem a bit pointless somtimes. is this only because the amount of money involved is small and people dont care too much are are most Sit n Go's like this? is this a good game-type to learn poker in?
advice appreciated,
thanks.

Mellor

Tourney poker and cash poker are different.
Play cash if you want to learn how to play certain hands and situations.
Play tourneys if you want to learn how to adjust your play with a tourney structure.
$1 $2 and $5 all play the same, roughly
So play a limit that suits the bankroll you have online

Kannon

ok thanks Mellor. would i be right in saying that the games with more money involved would generally have better players? or do you still get a good share of people who dont really seem to care and make nonsensical plays?

Macspower

Kannon wrote: »

ok thanks Mellor. would i be right in saying that the games with more money involved would generally have better players? or do you still get a good share of people who dont really seem to care and make nonsensical plays?

Hi Kannon Welcome to the forum,

it's the prople that don't care that will make the game profitable for you in the end.. As you move up the levles there will be more better players but also still a fair share of donkeys...

Advise that you look through the stickeys for some tips and there is a hand history section here... you should post up some hands that you found difficult and you'll get some help in there.

I'm don't play many SNG's myself but there are some on here that do very very well playing almost nothing else

best of luck,

Mac

robinlacey

hi kannon,

i started out playing tournaments and this was what i mainly played for my first two years or so. i now feel strongly that this was a big waste of my time and wish i had skipped tournaments altogether and started playing cash games,which are much more profitable and interesting. it is easier to learn how to play tournaments,but in my opinion it is worth the effort learning how to play cash games,and i wish i had known this when i was starting out.

Flushdraw

robinlacey wrote: »

hi kannon,

i started out playing tournaments and this was what i mainly played for my first two years or so. i now feel strongly that this was a big waste of my time and wish i had skipped tournaments altogether and started playing cash games,which are much more profitable and interesting. it is easier to learn how to play tournaments,but in my opinion it is worth the effort learning how to play cash games,and i wish i had known this when i was starting out.

Hi Robin,

Do you really find cash games more interesting than tournaments? I'm completely the opposite. I get bored pretty easy with cash games, which is probably why i'm not very good at them. I know there's a lot to cash games but 90% of good players are always topped up to the max, and with blinds not going up, theres a lot of similar scenarios that are constantly popping up.

Tournaments on the other hand, are far more interesting imo as you have to adjust your game towards the increasing blinds, yoyoing stacks and different scenarios as you approach bubbles and money jumps where stealing blinds/antes becomes a must and very profitable

smoothcall

id certainly agree that there is more too cash games, and A lot more skill at times, alot of smaller tournys you can do well by playin good pre flop poker and have no idea how to play later streets.

Altough theres no better feeling in poker than being at a FT, and then winning it

oh and to the op , play sit n go till you get a good general knowledge (say beating 10/20 $ ), then id move to low limits cash . itl take a while to adjust but well wirth it

Macspower

For me now cash games are work and I keep tourneys for entertainment lol with my record in them I wouldn't want to be trying to make a living out of them...

Flushdraw

Thats sort of what i mean Paul. I know Robin is one of, if not the best cash game player that posts on here. With his knowledge, i was just wondering if he still finds these games interesting or are a lot of decisions now done on autopilot where they may become boring at times. Especially at the higher limits where you probably meet the same players day in and day and get to know each others games inside out.

Maybe its the fact that you can 8 table for 3 hours and get a massive ROI where you could play a tournament for the same time and bubble for nothing. I just find the challenge of constantly adjusting your game to meet table dynamics far more interesting than the slog of cash games.

Sorry for slightly derailing your thread Kannon

robinlacey

Flushdraw wrote: »

Hi Robin,

Do you really find cash games more interesting than tournaments? I'm completely the opposite. I get bored pretty easy with cash games, which is probably why i'm not very good at them. I know there's a lot to cash games but 90% of good players are always topped up to the max, and with blinds not going up, theres a lot of similar scenarios that are constantly popping up.

Tournaments on the other hand, are far more interesting imo as you have to adjust your game towards the increasing blinds, yoyoing stacks and different scenarios as you approach bubbles and money jumps where stealing blinds/antes becomes a must and very profitable

i think superficially what you are saying may be true,but it hasn't been my experience. the thing with tournaments is that with almost all hands there's only one way to play them,especially late on you're really just folding most of the time,hoping for either a good hand which you'll try to get all in with or a good situation for a squeeze/resteal,etc. this may be something of an exaggeration,but i often feel that with tournaments you can get close enough to their being an optimum strategy,i know a lot of mathsy people do calculations regarding what cards to push with depending on stacksizes,etc,it all just seems a little too close to being solved for me.which is not to say that there are not great tournament players and interesting situations,i just think there are less of them.

cash games,on the other hand,you rarely encounter the same situation,and i just feel you have much more room to manouver. there must be billions of possible situations that can arise,and the joy of improving at cash games is that you gradually get a feel for certain types of situations,but you have to be much more aware of how they are adjusting to you as well,there's just so much going on.

i know that most hands are played with 100 bb stacks between people with similar stats,but that still leaves a whole world of different situations that can arise. i often think people focus too much on HUD stats and try to generalise about how a 21/15/2.7 player would play in this situation,wheras in reality very few players are that predictable,and often the rhythm of the table,psychology and so on can tell you more about how they are playing than even the largest sample of stats.

this is what makes the games interesting for me,you are constantly in a dynamic environment that may on the surface seem to be much the same (and a lot of mediocre players act as if it is indeed much the same) whereas in reality theres a lot more going on. i've been playing cash games seriously for a few years now and i feel like i've still got a long long way to go,there's just so much going on that i can't imagine i'll ever get bored with it,although sometimes i wish it was less of a challenge!

that was obviously fairly waffly but hopefully you can see what i mean.

Flushdraw

Cheers Robin. That makes a lot of sense. I can see exactly where you're coming from and i've no real reason to disagree with anything you say.

I've always been a tournament player and i've tried a few times to make the transition over to cash games but i just cant do it successfully. I think i need to try and understand where the top cash game players are coming from and try follow their leads.

Nice post

Irish_Nomad

This is my first post on the poker forum so I'd like to say hi to everyone and thanks to all the regular posters. Reading through your messages has been a big help to me in learning.

To the OP : I'm just a little ahead of you in that I've been playing for around 3 months so maybe hearing about my experiences might help you.

For the first month I hadn't a clue and jumped around trying different types of games losing money in the process. Between ring games, STTs, and MTTs ; Hold’em and NL ; standard, speed, and turbo : entry fees from $1 to $22 ; I was down about $700 by the time got myself sorted out.

After that I decided STTs would suit me best. I suspected ring games required more skill and didn’t think I was ready for them while MTTs were too wild particularly if re-buys were allowed and freerolls just seemed to be a complete waste of time. I also figured that playing STTs I would encounter a wider range of situations (from 10 players to heads-up) than in ring games so it would be better for my development. With STTs I felt could manage my bankroll better. I had a hard time choosing between Hold’em and NL but plumped for NL.

So for the next few weeks I only played $6 NL STTs and found I was winning more than I was losing. I then moved up to the $11 STTs as the site takes a smaller cut of the entry fee. About the same time I bought Pokertracker since everyone seems to regard it as an essential tool. To be honest I don’t find the players stats as useful as I expected since everyone changes their style to some degree as the tourney progresses. I imagine it’s more valuable in the ring games.

I had about a month of treading water, winning one day, losing the next and then for no particular reason that I can discern I began winning more consistently. Like you at the beginning I found the constant all-ins early in a tourney to be frustrating but now I recognise that the guys that do that often get a chip lead early on but usually give it all away again.

Now I have more confidence and play the occasional MTT and even 1 or 2 cash games with reasonable success so I've recovered most of that $700.

If I could go back in time and start again my approach would be to
:- practise with the play money games or play at very low level stakes until I achieved some degree of competence
:- avoid cash games (I lost money there much quicker than in tourneys).
:- stick to one variation of game

I hope some of that is useful.

p.s. I almost forgot. I would recommend getting Pokerstove. You can check the probabilities and I found it very handy. Several times I discovered my chances of winning a pot were not at all what I expected – very educational.

ollyk1

Irish_Nomad wrote: »

This is my first post on the poker forum so I'd like to say hi to everyone and thanks to all the regular posters. Reading through your messages has been a big help to me in learning.

Nice first post sir! Welcome on board to both yourself and the OP.

zuutroy

I think STT's are a decent way to start out for a while. Thats what I started with, and I made a steady but very small profit. I think they're an enjoyable way to learn the basics, for a fixed risk each time. I then played MTT's alongside the STT's for a while and did alright too, to the point where I had a decent bankroll for $25nl and as most of the talk on here is about cash, I started playing at $10nl to see what the fuss was about and once I got into it, I started to prefer it to tournaments. I play the odd MTT when I'm pissed off or for the craic on Sunday but I'm trying to develop as a cash player.
I think there's a lot of work to do and I'd argue that even $10nl and $25nl are a lot harder now then when some of the more experienced lads here were working their way up. Since the start of September, when I begun playing cash, I only beat those two levels for something 2ptbb/100 over my first 20k cash hands (better than losing I guess). After a lot of effort (cardrunners, posting here, reading here, reading 2+2, reviewing sessions) I think I have the basics down and should be able to beat $50nl for a better rate than that if I can fight the nitty demons.
I'd recommend to play a mix of STT's and and $10nl and see what you think suits you best, but I think the best return comes from cash.

PPP-Pit Boss

IMHO. Unless you have a very strong awareness of br management and discipline starting off on cash games is risky at best.
In short I recommend SNG's at a manageable buyin level to learn the basics, followed by micro-stakes cash play with a minimum of 25 buyins.

Kannon

thanks all for your kind welcomes and well-wishes. thank also for your inputs, some very helpful posts indeed.
from what i can gather from most, tournaments may be the best option for me at the moment. as someone said there is a fixed risk, and having ventured into a cash table last night to check it out, that may be a good thing for me at this point in time as it didnt go too well.
also, i am reading dan harrinton's books at the moment which i think are more geared towards tournaments.
anyway thanks again all.