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adapting the MM to an unusual main game
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adapting the MM to an unusual main game
I played holdem for part or all of my living off and on for the last 15 years or so. I started with limit, then switched way too late to no limit, and now I’m attempting (again, way too late) to switch to plo.
I started playing plo on an app near the end of 2019, and the games were soft enough that I could beat them pretty solidly with my very limited understanding of the game. (I’d read most of Hwang’s first book, and I think I read Rolf Slotboom’s book sometime in the late 2000s🤣.) Since then, I’ve continued playing primarily on apps, and have averaged a ~20BB/100 winrate over ~60k hands in the last year and a half. This has been 1-tabling on my phone, and occasionally 2-tabling between my phone and a tablet. I am unable (to the best of my knowledge) to use a tracker with the primary app I use, but I have always kept a spreadsheet of my session results including number of hands played, $ won or lost, the date of the game, blind structure, which app/room it was in, etc. I think I’m a reasonably capable and experienced poker player, but am well aware that my plo education is in its infancy, and attribute this winrate almost entirely to the softness of the games.
I joined MM a month and a half ago, started with a few of the live plo videos (as that structure/gameplay most closely resembles my games), and then started working through the 10 week transformation. December 2020 was my best month on the app over the last year and a half, and while it’s likely largely variance, I attribute at least some of that to what I’d learned in the MM. Then I got crushed in the first couple weeks of January, and while variance is of course still a thing, I felt like I was having difficulty internalizing lot of the post flop strategy I was picking up (and some preflop) and adapting it and applying it to a very different game structure. The primary games I was playing in the app were full ring, $1-$2 with a $0.50 ante, occasionally $1.50-$3.00 with the same $0.50 ante. There’s an optional utg straddle, which I’d estimate is posted ~20% of the time, and there’s a wide range of stack depth, but there are typically multiple players over $1k deep, and often later in the evening $2k+.
Since my early January downswing on the apps, I decided to take a break from the apps, and really focus on my fundamentals by continuing the 10 week transformation, and switching to 6max 100BB plo on Poker Stars for my playing. Obviously this meant dropping significantly in stakes (I now split my time between PLO30 and PLO50), as well as in income. I’ve gone back and forth on whether this is the right strategy to employ, and am still unsure. Most of my income is currently coming from poker, but I have enough savings that I could not work for a while and be fine. That said, it pains me to know that I have access to such a soft game (which may well dry up when covid restrictions on casinos loosen and the players can return to live games) and I’m instead playing a tougher game for much smaller stakes. On the other hand, I’m concerned that I’ll continue running into issues attempting to internalize the 100BB 6max strategy set forth in the MM while simultaneously adapting it to a loose ring game with an ante that plays much deeper.
So I’m posting this, partly to work through the situation myself, and partly in hopes that the MM community may have helpful thoughts or suggestions.
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1 Reply
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tl;dr
I’m playing a full ring deep stack game with an ante, and want to become an absolute crusher in it, but am having difficulty working on my MM fundamentals while simultaneously figuring out how to adapt them to this game.
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