For some of them, it has been like a thrilling roller coaster ride. They would sometimes text me with stories of how they spiked the Ace in the river to beat out a donkey. Or tell me bad beat stories of 2 outers. But generally, they feel that it is something that they want to continue because they do see some positive results.
For some, it has been a frustrating experience. Even following sound poker techniques, they seem to be losing more than winning. When I ask them about certain hands, they seemed to have made their decisions based on correct math. But I look at their ROIs and it is in the negative.
I don't really have the time to give them actual coaching. What with my full time job, my family and my own playing. I have no spare time as it is. I definitely do not see any free time to squeeze in some coaching lessons.
I was kind of pondering this playing correctly but still losing phenomenon. And then I went back and looked at some of my graphs when I first started playing online poker and realized that I was actually also a losing player in the beginning.
I decided to attach these initial graphs in this blog just to assuage newbies that in some cases, you just need more experience. Knowing the correct move is easy when you're reading a book. But in actual play, there are so many scenarios that happen, that it actually takes real hand experience to know how to react and play appropriately.
The 2 graphs shown above are from playing SNGs. So it is games played against total profit earned. I have circled in yellow the relevant part. These are basically graphs from the first poker sites that I played in when I was a fishy beginner. You can see in the first graph that it took me almost 500 games before I started earning something. In the second graph, even though I was winning at first, I eventually lost everything and it took 200 games for the graph to trend continously upwards.
When I started playing online poker, I also read a lot of books. And I followed some of the advice given religiously and played correct poker. But I still lost. It took a certain amount of experience (in this case around 700 SNG games in total) before I could play well enough to make consistent money.
I'm not saying that the books are wrong. Because they are obviously giving correct advice. Proof of this is that even though I was losing, I wasn't losing much. You can see from the above graphs that my losses never exceeded 100 dollars. Parang slightly negative but still kind of breaking even.
So the point I am trying to make is that Nothing Beats Experience. After I gained enough online experience, there was no looking back. All my remaining graphs trended upwards immediately. Again, I would like to point out that I am not a pro or any kind of expert player. I am just like you. I work a full time job and play a couple of hours at night and some on weekends. That's it. No special coaching or lessons. Just reading some and playing some.
So my advice to newbies who seem to be having a hard time getting over the hump. Don't get discouraged. If you are playing correctly and following good BR management, it just takes time but eventually good things will happen. As Kevin Costner put it in Field of Dreams "If you build it, they will come". Heheh
No comments:
Post a Comment