Hi All,
I've had plenty of practice in the microstakes cash and MTT's on Pokerstars, and have been successful in local live cash and tournament formats (in bars and home games). Recently, I made some runs at the Casino (Skycity, Auckland) in order to try and get a feel for what the level of play was like relative to my ability.
I found that it was in fact much lower than I expected. In the cash games, players are worse than PS microstakes players, frequently limp-calling from early positions with trash hands, calling down to the showdown OOP with nothing but bottom pair, calling flop shoves with nothing but flush draws, etc. In the tournaments, I see players limping and folding on flops when they started with less than 10bb, or calling for their whole stack pre-flop with extremely marginal hands, in situations that are obviously -$EV and against ICM.
In terms of results, I ran well in a couple tournaments and went up +$700, then recently lost a couple of $300 buyins on the cash tables, so up $100 total.
In terms of performance, I made mostly solid decisions in the MTT's, except once I had made the cash and reached 3-handed on both occaisons, fell apart a little bit and made a some bad calls I could have avoided with more patience. In the cash games, I was getting coolered quite badly; getting all the money in preflop with Aces only to be cracked by JT making the straight, or flopping a straight myself only to lose to a flushdraw after getting it in on the flop, or turning a straight only to lose to a higher straight on the river. Generally my decisions were reasonable.
So on paper, there is a part of me that would like to continue, given that the stakes are much higher than I normally play at while the level of competition is much, much weaker.
Two problems however:
BRM: So far I've been working within a bankroll of maybe $2000. I've made a profit of about $1000 from poker, including the above results, although over the last year most of that has come from tournaments with $20 buy-ins. Losing twenty cash buy-ins in a row at the casino would be a loss of $6000. That would put a dent in my savings, but wouldn't affect my life otherwise, and yet... it would be uncomfortable and I suspect I might go on tilt once I neared that point.
The Rake: Some of the tournaments have fees of around 25%, and the cash games are 10% rake, capped at $15. So you want to be winning someone's stack in a pot above $500 in a single hand, in order to keep the rake at a more comfortable 3%... but this isn't a frequent enough situation. Even if I do start turning a profit, would it really be significant enough relative to the risks taken, given these rather taxing percentages?
I welcome the advice of more experienced career players.
