Not too sure how many of you have experience with online poker, but I'm sure at least a few of you dabble in it since so much of the game is rooted in solid, mathematically-sound play.
For background, I play on Stars exclusively now-- used to play a lot on UB in my college days but inevitably cashed out to pay my tuition and other bills. Luckily that was before they got shut down and so I got to keep my money. I've been playing semi-seriously again since January when I was home from work sick with the flu for a couple days, and ended up getting hooked back in. I run quite well on 25/50 and 50/100 NL full ring cash games, but also play SnGs and some of the big MTTs as well. Have posted 3rd place finishes in both the Hot 5.50 and the Hotter 11, and outright won the Hot 22 a couple weeks ago. From the reading I've done, it seems a lot of people don't believe there is much money to be made on the smaller SNGs, so I might just stop playing them all together. Not sure how you folks feel about this? General consensus seems to be that cash games are the bread and butter and the big MTTs are for fun and taking big swings at big money.
My other question would be about HUDs and other software. I've use two programs now... Hold Em Manager and Hold Em/Tournament Indicator. For those who don't know what a poker HUD does, it basically tracks all of your stats and the stats of the players at your table and breaks the numbers down into stats like VP$IP ( Voluntarily Put $ In Pot), Aggression Factor, etc etc. This is obviously useful for getting a "read" on certain players at your table as far as whether they're loose/tight, aggressive/passive, an so on.
Of the two programs, I think I prefer Indicator for a couple of reasons... It's a smaller program that doesn't take up as much memory. It lists things like pot odds, win odds, outs etc. on the HUD without having to switch tabs. The Tournament Indicator also has a calculation for your M Rating which I haven't found on HEM... Not that it's a hard calculation to do yourself (blinds + antes / stack), but it's a real time saver and very handy in turbos where you're on a timer and that time is best used making decisions rather than calculations. But mostly I like HEI/TI over HEM because I've had repeated issues with PostGreSQL (a cloud service for storing hand informtion, I believe) on HEM, and have had no such issues with HEI/TI. I think overall the depth of information provided by HEM is superior, and I REALLY like how it tracks your wins/losses, but I just keep having issues with the software itself.
So ya, do any of you play? What are your preferred games, and how do you feel about cash vs SnGs vs MTTs? And what kind of software, if any, do you use?
Poker HUDs
Re: Poker HUDs
Ah, online poker.
I started playing around 2003, with a $10 "no deposit bonus" at Absolute. I signed up, got my $10 and promptly lost it. A few days later I was bored so I signed up for a new Hotmail account and re-registered at Absolute to get another $10...lost it again. A few days later I was bored and did it one more time. This time, entered a $5 tournament and won it for something like $70...and that became my bankroll that I played with for years, mostly at Stars. Unfortunately it started taking up too much of my free time so I quit for good in 2008 (that's when I discovered proline!). Cashed out a total of $38k over those 5 years, all from that free 10 bucks.
I played cash, SNG and MTT but I had the best results at SNGs. At the height of my prime (Sept 2006) I was pulling 27% ROI at $100 SNGs, good for the #1 spot (by a good margin) on the sharkscope leaderboard for $35-100 SNG average profit per game. I'm sure the games have gotten much tougher since my day, but I always found that most players did not know how to shift between correct early-game, mid-game, bubble and short-handed strategies and properly adjust to increasing blinds/antes. I never made much use of HUDs - they were used more by cash game players back then.
Sounds like you're doing pretty well so keep it up.
I started playing around 2003, with a $10 "no deposit bonus" at Absolute. I signed up, got my $10 and promptly lost it. A few days later I was bored so I signed up for a new Hotmail account and re-registered at Absolute to get another $10...lost it again. A few days later I was bored and did it one more time. This time, entered a $5 tournament and won it for something like $70...and that became my bankroll that I played with for years, mostly at Stars. Unfortunately it started taking up too much of my free time so I quit for good in 2008 (that's when I discovered proline!). Cashed out a total of $38k over those 5 years, all from that free 10 bucks.
I played cash, SNG and MTT but I had the best results at SNGs. At the height of my prime (Sept 2006) I was pulling 27% ROI at $100 SNGs, good for the #1 spot (by a good margin) on the sharkscope leaderboard for $35-100 SNG average profit per game. I'm sure the games have gotten much tougher since my day, but I always found that most players did not know how to shift between correct early-game, mid-game, bubble and short-handed strategies and properly adjust to increasing blinds/antes. I never made much use of HUDs - they were used more by cash game players back then.
Sounds like you're doing pretty well so keep it up.