Tilt And Online Poker Play

[screbner 0]

Hi all,I have been playing poker for a few years now, and im 18 years old. Having just recently been allowed to enter the casino i have done fairly well with limit poker, as i was a bit scarred to play NL with all those big stacks. Recently i decided to try NL and failed misserabley. Any tips on making this switch?Also i have just started online at poker stars and its terrible. I cant win anything. What are some key strategies with building a bank roll online and so forth.Thanks for your helpglyn

[Zach6668 513]

Um...If I had an extra 20892745 hours I could teach you.I don't. Well, I do, but I'd rather play xbox.In short, read every thing you can. Poker books are a good place to start (Small Stakes Hold'Em for LHE, and No Limit Theory and Practice for NL, also Theory of Poker is good).Read posts in the forum here which relates to the game you play. Reply to those posts with your thoughts or questions, take any criticism as constructive. Post your own hands where you feel you made a poor decision, or didn't know what to do. Forget results, they mean nothing on a hand by hand basis. You could completely eff up a hand, and win a billion dollars, and we'd still tell you that you played it wrong. You could just as easily lose a billion dollars, having played a hand perfectly.I'd recommend playing micro limits online, at least until you get accustomed to it.Follow proper bankroll management. If you don't know what this is, search, or ask. Or go broke, I don't care much (especially if you can redeposit at will).Do not tilt. If you feel yourself tilting, leave the tables.Only play when you can play your 'A' game, ie do not play when tired, tilty, angry, depressed, etc.If I can think of anything else, I will tell you.

[David_Nicoson 1]

Allow me to recycle my comment regarding transitioning to no-limit.As far as bank-roll management, start small. Play at a level until you can say to yourself, "I'm confident that I can beat this." You probably want 10 buy-ins or something, but I find the former constraint to be the limiting factor.

[RabidTortuga 0]

I started out as strictly a limit player because I liked the idea that I couldn't lose all my money on one hand. Eventually, losing $100 bucks playing limit didn't bother me like it initially did, so I got the guts up to play No Limit. Unfortunately for me, I was successful early on playing $10 and $25 NL online, and then the 1/2 $300 max game at the Taj.I say unfortunately because I still had no real understanding of the game, either limit or NL. I hadn't begun to study, had no bankroll to speak of, and didn't track my results. I woke up after a bad streak that saw me go from $600 bucks to $120 online in about 10 hours on week, followed by a weekend at the Borgata 2 weeks later where I ended up putting 5 buy-ins on the table at the $300 1/2 NL game. With my last $300 on the table, I lost a pot against a shorter stack that left me at $140 after I reraised him all-in with my flush draw. So here I am, $1360 down in a 1/2 game, and one of the big stacks at the table (mainly due to me) decided to say something to the guy next to him that changed my poker life."These guys think a flush draw is the nuts."The guy next to him laughed, looking right at me.It's funny, but I never understood the idea that after you lost a certain amount in a game, losing more didn't hurt. Until right then, when I realized I didn't care that I was down, I didn't care what they thought, I just wanted to play well and win. It never occured to me that I wasn't playing well until right there, thanks to that comment.Since then, I've read every book I can find, read every major strategy forum regularly (though I should post more), and become a modest winner at the lowest limits online and live. I recommend you pick either limit or no-limit, and stick to it exclusively for a few hundred (thousand would be better) hours of play. I recommend limit, for several reasons. First, you need less bankroll to start out. 300 Big Bets is a pretty deep bankroll for limit hold-em, which means you have a full deep bankroll for .25/.50 online with just $150. 20 buy-ins is a shortish bankroll for NL, which means you have $200 for $10NL online, and it can vanish quickly if you play poorly or get unlucky.Second, limit is more mechanical, and less read dependant at the lowest limits. You will have time to learn the fundamental skills of winning poker (position, pot odds, equity, position, basic reading of betting patterns, value betting, bluffing, position, inducing bluffs, position, position) while your mistakes will only cost you one or two bets, rather than a whole pot or your whole buy-in.Third, once you have these fundamentals down to the point that working them out becomes second nature, you will find the transition to NL a bit easier, because the same skills become much more involved and complex, and you can concentrate on improving them while understanding things crucial to NL like bet size, implied odds, position, understanding the effect of stack size on your and your opponents play, blocking bets, position, and position.I'd start by reading Hold-em Poker by Sklansky, followed by Small Stakes Hold-Em. Once you feel like you have things in hand (i.e. you've read the books, played 50k hands online, understand when to apply what you've read, and have at least broken even over those 50k hands) I'd suggest reading Theory of Poker and Hold-Em for Advanced Players, as well as the limit hold-em section of Super System 2 by Jennifer Harman. Common wisdom is that these books aren't appropriate for low limit hold-em, but I've found my winrate has only increased by applying more advanced concepts and slightly tweaking what I learned in SSHE. The low limit games have gotten alot tougher since I started playing 4 years ago, and there are alot of players playing the SSHE style (or trying to), and using what you learn from the advanced books can help you exploit the better (or at least tighter) players.If all that bores the crap out of you, or you have the bankroll for it and aren't scared to lose it, jump right into NL with at least 20 buy ins, read No Limit Hold 'Em Theory and Practice, as well as Harrington on Hold-em volumes 1 and 2 (they're for tournament play, but you will still learn alot), and the Theory of Poker, and start our playing very tight until you have a good understanding of the flow of the game.Whatever you do, post two hands a day to the strategy forums, either here or at 2+2, respond to hands that you think you understand, and a couple you probably don't, and take the feedback constructively. Don't be afraid to post the worst hand you played. All the reading in the world won't help half as much as the feedback you will get by participating in either forum.