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I Am Trash (3 Viewers)

KingWithTheAxe

KingWithTheAxe

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Really love the “is this already being discussed,” feature! Haha

5 month cooler. Cant seem to scrape unless I’m in a 5/10. Just really struggling in lower stakes. Read 3-4 books, found them dreadfully focused on statistical analysis. Any good books on how to play lower stakes, I’m tilting.

Aggressive style, no doubt, but can’t stand getting called down with rags.

May I ask what’s your longest cooler?
 
All this comes with the typical "I suck at poker and am a grinning rec", but you already knew that. The flush-over-straight in 7stud was just a straight cooler, you were dealt a game over. You're definitely not trash, you're just not a pro, you play for fun. You came in 2nd in my tournament!

1. I would give you my copy of The Course but I'm moving and love it. Order it and enjoy, really effective. Another one is Beyond GTO, it uses the charts and GTO but explains why it matters to mooks like us that have quarters on the table, not just the high rollers. The Course is very non-mathy and would be my first advice, Beyond is a bit more mathy but explained well. When I'm on a downswing I take some time aside and buy a book or something and try to pick up a concept.

2. Are the stakes so low that you don't play tight? Find yourself calling with dumb hands and stuff, then feeling the need to defend them multi-way? When in doubt, fold. Mistakes compound and at our baby stakes there's not many players putting you in awful spots.

3. Sometimes rags are better than having second nut hands for calling down; the whole idea is "with the range you preflop bet, and then you bet flop, that turn/river didn't help you. If I didn't believe you before I don't believe you now!".

Lol you've seen my game, bluffing is rare damnit. I'll try and have another before we move, you're always top of list. You gotta bring those tournament chips around for me to see before I leave end of August.
 
It really depends on a lot of factors, but if you’re playing purely for profit and “can’t stand getting called down with rags”, I’d say you need to play a tighter range of hands, value bet more, bluff less. Then at least when you’re called down with worse hands, you have the better of it more often.

I rarely play anymore, but I am certainly a losing player these days. I’m more in it for the social aspect, so my range is much more loose because what fun is folding 80-90% of hands?

In casino/more formal games where I’m not there only for social, I’d expect to be a marginal winner focusing on more “ABC” poker at low stakes.
 
Its sounds like OP has met the cruel and heartless mistress that is variance.

Embrace it.
Make sure you're playing for fun.

Fold pre if you should, but the game begins after the flop. So good luck with that.
 
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My entire poker 'career' has been all over 7 years. And I was a steady loser for 5.5 of them. That's why I played so little in the beginning.

But things changed in the last 1.5 years. A string of decent cashes in both cash and tourney built my confidence up, and I began to play more often. And as I saw more hands and more situations, my play improved. I don't obsess about tracking my wins and losses because it's really still a social thing for me, and I hope it stays that way. But the extra money in my pocket is a welcome surprise.
 
Three months for me also, but that was online. Can see live going waaay longer due to lower volume of hands. My hope is you are tracking profits well so you know for sure.
 
KingWithTheAxe said:
5 month cooler. Cant seem to scrape unless I’m in a 5/10. Just really struggling in lower stakes. Read 3-4 books, found them dreadfully focused on statistical analysis. Any good books on how to play lower stakes, I’m tilting.

Aggressive style, no doubt, but can’t stand getting called down with rags.
Click to expand...
This last remarks screams to me that you are probably bluffing too much. If you are being "called down by rags" one of two things is probably happening.

1) Your opponents are just naturally loose
2) Your opponents are observant and actually adjusting to call you wider on the river.

The first case is easier to correct strategically than the second, but in either case, these sorts of opponents are bad bluffing targets. You need to get it out of your head that they should be folding just because you bet. You are frustrated that they are calling you down, but you are bluffing so much you are rewarding them for calling you down. That won't get them to stop.

The only way to punish them for calling too much is to attack them with value bets, even very thin ones, if they are calling wide. This strategy requires a bit of patience because you actually need to make an average strength hand at the end. But when you do you, even your thinnest value bets are pure profit that just doesn't exist against good opponents.
 
Where are you playing? I’ve had an 80% win rate over the past 2 years since I started playing $1/3 at the casino again. It’s a MUCH easier game than my home game.

Things that I have adjusted that have benefited me
  • Don’t bluff bad players
  • Get into limped pots with almost any hand. If you hit the flop with 2 pair or better bet hard. If you miss fold and don’t chase
  • Raise at least 4x with good hands…more if in early position or late with multiple limpers
  • Don’t hero call..even if the pot odds are good. (people on YouTube do this way too much) Weak players almost ALWAYS have 2 pair or better (often better) if they are betting on the river
  • Don’t slow play or trap unless you are super nutted (like flopping a full house, flush, or obvious straight)
  • Play against bad players. If there is more than 1-2 other solid players at your table change tables. I learned this from watching solid players leave after I sat down and played a few hands. I first I thought it was weird then it dawned on me I was cutting into their profitability
  • Check call or check raise from early position. I have rarely found a time when leading out has benefited me. People either fold (mostly) or re raise with monsters (rarely).
  • “I just have to see it” should never come across your mind
  • Bad beats are good in the long run. It encourages bad play to continue. You have to think that way….because it’s true
  • Did I forget to mention don’t bluff bad players??
 
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I think you should spend some time with the wonderful mistress known as PLO. That will help you put your NLHE problems in perspective.

Some sound advice above. I agree with the comment that you probably bluff too much. You have already complained about books being statistic-heavy, but a big part of poker is game theory-based, and if your frequencies are off, you'll be exploitable. Good players have figured out exploits for agro players that have frequencies out of line. I'm guessing yours are waaay out of line, but I don't know your stats. A good rule of thumb is that you should have a 3:1 value to bluff ratio. That's hard to play against. Get that frequency off too much and you'll be toast. Out in the live streets, you run into a lot of people with stats that are like 10:1 value (i.e., nits and OMCs), and 1:2 or worse bluff (i.e., probably you). Pretty easy to play against people who are way off.

Play Optimal Poker by Andrew Brokos is a good read if you handle some simple math.

If you don't want to do any math....again, I'd suggest PLO.

Or spelling competitions.
 
These days I only play with our home crowd. Aside from the hasty 5-6 guy cash games, we do 7 tourneys a year plus the freeroll Tournament of Champions.
I went 0-for-7 cashing in those in 2023.
And in 2024.
If followed the same M.O. -- I'd play pretty LAGgy early on, then "go card dead" when the blinds went up. Turns out I was just tightening up and guys were adjusting.
In 2025 I committed to "What happens happens" and try to win big pots on guile and bulls**t if I had to.
I won the first 3 events of 2025 and have pretty much paid for my buy ins through 2026.
 
Variance - it's not just ups and downs, it also includes droughts.

The best player in my tournaments has attended 76 events. He has taken home 1st place money 19 times (25%) and cashed 39 times (51.3%). This isn't some small field either; average attendance of games he has played is 17.6 players. This guy is a mathematical, soul-reading machine.

Yet, it has been over a year since he last cashed.

Sometimes your opponents suck out, and sometimes you get hung-out with a cooler. Occasionally, those beats will line up and you will feel like your game is really off. This can encourage you to play differently than you normally would, which is not necessarily better.

Remember, you are not a pro. You can lose $100 playing poker for 4 hours with your friends, or you can go to a ball game, spend $75 on a ticket, $25 on parking, and $20 on a hot dog and one beer for the same 4 hours (though 1 hour of the ball game entertainment is getting out of the parking lot). At low stakes, you probably don't need to change what used to work - most home game regs don't vary their game that much to adapt to one player. You need to view it for what it really is - great entertainment.
 
I went on a cooler for about 4-5 months a couple winters ago, where it felt like I could not win without making the absolute, uncounterfeitable nuts.

Flop a set? Someone is going to make a backdoor straight. Flop a straight? They call down for the backdoor flush. Flop the nut flush? Straight flush on tap for the villain. Flop a boat? Villain rivers a bigger boat.

It was incredible. I never stopped playing, because it seemed impossible for the runbad to continue. I was getting it in good but losing 98% of the time.

Then it did continue. For months.

The hand which nearly broke me was when I opened with QJs. Flop comes 89T rainbow. Nut straight. Guy leads out, I raise, he shoves, I call.

Run it three times? he asks. Sure, I got this one. He turns over 88 for a set vs my straight.

Board 1: 77x
Board 2: 9xx
Board 3: Txx

He boats up on all three.

Finally after months of misery I started winning these hands here and there, until the variance returned to normal. Never got to the state of running absurdly good to balance out the months of bad, but at least things settled down.
 
I lost ~12K at 6/12 mixed and had 3 winning sessions over the course of a year. So yeah, downturns can last a while. Limit poker is also more volatile than NL or PL, and mixed games like tripe draw introduce even more variance.

I’m clawing that loss back this year, primarily at 8/16 mixed where we pay time and the player pool is much looser and frankly more enjoyable to play with.

The consensus from a lot of players I’ve talked to is that the rake at 6/12 is almost unbeatable. There are probably 60 people in the player pool and probably 2 are winning players (and they are probably single digit BB average winners per session).

I’d also consider what stakes you play, what the rake is, and what the player pool looks like.

FWIW, going back to low stakes NLHE seems a lot easier to play after so much limit and mixed games.
 
TLDR: The best players in the game might expect to lose money one year in three playing limit mixed games.

A bit of math - using limit hold'em data rather than mixed games. The mixed games are reputed to have even higher variance than limit hold'em

A win rate of 2 big bets per hundred hands played is considered quite good. Such a player is going to be in the top couple of percent of the player pool.

Limit hold'em has a standard deviation of +/- 13 big bets per hundred hands played.

For our hypothetical 2BB/100 winner, this means their typical results would be their result for the next 100 hands would range between winning 15BB and losing 11BB two thirds of the time. The other third of the time, the results would be even more extreme.

Let's say our winner plays 10,000 hands. They expect to win (2 x 100=) 200 big bets on average.

The variance grows with the square root of sample size. So we have played 100 times more hands, and our variance is SQR(100) = 10 times larger. In this case +/- 130. Here our hero wins between 70BB and 330BB two thirds of the time. If Hero has bad enough luck to fall two standard deviations from expected value, they would lose 60 big bets after playing 10,000 hands. ( 200BB - 130BB X two standard deviations = -60BB)

10,000 hands is a lot of hands. Limit mixed games aren't that fast. Maybe 25 hands per hour. So, 10,000 hands ----> 400 hours of play. That is 50 eight-hour days of poker. Or roughly a year of weekly games.

Let's say limit mixed games have a variance of 20BB per hundred hands. Then the 10,000 hand results look like +200BB +/- (20BB X 10=) 200BB. Meaning that Hero should expect to lose money a third of the time - one year in three.

That limit poker stuff is rough! -=- DrStrange
 
The casino $1/3 has been so soft and lucrative I dont know there is a real reason to play other games. WAY easier and passive than during the poker boom. If you want to get your confidence back I recommend sticking to casino $1/3 Hold’em. As long as you stay disciplined it’s almost like stealing money.

In my last 8 sessions at Borgata since I’ve been tracking I average $62 and hour with an 88% win rate. At Encore Boston…even with double the rake of Borgata, I’m $88.15 an hour and a 60% win rate over the last 6 sessions.

Being I’m not trying to make a living at this and also never get board with Hold’em, I haven’t found a reason to play higher and against potentially better opponents.

I can better test my skills if I want to at my monthly home game against the regulars I’ve been playing with for 5-25 years. That’s a very tough game where I still have a 88% win rate but for only $15 and hour.
 

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