Experimentation and Implied Odds...

Now that I'm up to playing 12 tables at a time, the smallest component of my play can have drastic implications on my net earnings. About a week ago I experienced the best weekend I have ever had; I made about $1600 over three days. I really was playing well and getting cards in the right spots. This past weekend I had expected to have a similar result, having moved permanently to PartyPoker (home of the easiest games). Yet this did not happen.

I have noticed that my play has changed a little bit from at least a few weeks ago. For some reason I decided that when I value bet it should be the Howard Lederer amount of 60% of the pot. The problem with this bet is that you get called much less of the time (but of course you do make your play harder to read). Unfortunately, the players I am playing against rarely are paying enough attention to keep track of my betting patterns. Moreover if I was to bet a small "call me" bet of 15-20% of the pot, like I used to, I will be called about 90% of the time.

Additionally, I have started to play pocket pairs differently. I read a bit online and some players claimed to play pocket pairs to any raise less than 5% of their stack in any position. This seemed illogical to me at the time, but after trying it for the past week or so it clearly is not a smart long term play. Basically here is why:

When you call with a pocket pair you will hit a set about 11% of the time. Now sometimes you will win a pot without a set, but I think that the amount of times you do so probably equals the amount you lose when you get raised or have to fold to a big flop. That means that whatever you call preflop, you need to make at least 10X that amount to make the call profitable in the long run. So, if you call 4BBs you need to be able to make 40BBs or more when you hit a set. Now if you are in late position, or in multiway pots this is easily achieved, but if you are in early position or in a heads up pot its rare that you will ever get enough money from these hands.

I have dropped the Lederer value bet and the overplaying pocket pairs and have returned to my nice $200 per day earnings. I'm hoping to increase that once I move back up to the $.50/$1 limits again. We shalt see.