Micropkr grinder

Hey coogan

welcome to our blogging section.

The thing about poker is that there is no immediate feedback. You can win despite doing everything wrong and can lose despite doing everything right. You have to ignore the little spikes and focus on the long-term trend. good luck with your poker study and trust that it will pay off.

All the best!!

January ended well for me. After a good start to the month things started to go a little downhill for me only to pick up again at the end! My profit at end of January is

$31.85

That is an total profit for the month of $30.77. Actually only 60c of that profit came from cash games! I had a very good month in freerolls, winning $25 in one and smaller prizes along the way in others. So, if I had stuck completely to my new years resolution of only playing cash games I would have been only up 60c for the month.

My cash game record for the month doesn't seem too bad really. Out of 75 cash games I made a profit in 64 of them so I only made a loss in 14 of them. However, in 10 of those 14 losses I lost my buy-in. I tend also to re-buy if I'm felted. On a couple of occasions during the month I've managed to recoup my losses completely from a re-buy. Once you throw one buy-in away people tend to play a little looser against you and this can sometimes work to your advantage. But in one disastrous game during the month I lost $12, which is quite an impressive amount to lose considering that I am playing the lowest stakes possible! My cash game profits for the month would have been much healthier if I had just gone for a walk instead on January 24!

Looking back on my figures for the month I only find three instances where I've re-bought and recouped all my losses, compared to four cases where I've re-bought and got felted again. Those four occasions cost me $23, making re-buying a very expensive habit for me!

So what's my problem? I win more often than I lose. I tend to win small amounts, but when I lose, I lose big. I'm thinking that I need to build a stop-loss into my game so that if I am losing I get up and leave before I get felted. This is where more discipline is required. I need to be able to recognise when I'm being outplayed at a table and be prepared to cut my losses and leave. I think if I'm felted due to a genuine bad beat then I should still have the option to re-buy and try to turn it into a winning session. It's telling the difference between the two situations that requires the wisdom.


A day like many another. I played 15 cash games, won 12 and came out with just 19c profit. The reason? Because in the three games I lost I got felted! I didn't rebuy though which probably saved me at least one other buy-in. Instead I recovered my losses at other tables.

Of the three games I lost, I think I played reasonably well. In one I went all-in after the flop with two diamonds and two sevens on the board, holding ace diamonds and a seven. The two others in the the pot appeared to be chasing the flush and since two of them were chasing that meant less diamonds in the dealers hands! My all-in forced one of them out. The second guy thought about it and called as his clock was counting down. He got his flush.

The second one not so good. I rose it up about the size of the pot from early position with A,K clubs, got one caller. The board came down ragged enough, something like 6,7,10, a rainbow with no clubs. I checked. The villian bet 10c and I went all in. My hope was he would fold or that I could catch an ace or king. He called and showed A,10. Then came A,J. I'd probably have gone all in at the turn anyway if I hadn't done at the flop so I suppose the result would have been the same.

My third I had K,K on the button. A guy who was constantly making min raises from early position made one and had three callers. I wanted to narrow the field down to just one so I raised to about one and half times the pot. The only caller was the original minraiser. I forget the flop but it was harmless. No pairs, high cards, flush draws or connecters. I went all in, happy that the pot was big enough to take it down there. He called, showed A,7 and got an ace on the river.

Those three tales of woe cost me $6. The only thing that cheers me up today is that I won it all back!

February was another good month for me. My life-time profit at the end of the month stood at:

$63.21

Total profit for the month was $31.22. Unlike in January, the majority of my winnings this month were from cash games. I earned $10.62 from tournaments, mostly freerolls with some SNGs thrown in and the remaining $20.60 from cash games. That gave me an average earnings per hour from cash games of 66c in February compared to earnings per hour of 2c in January!

I played on seven sites during the month and here is a break-down of my profit/loss on each. Losses are in brackets:

888 16.48
BetVictor (4.15)
mFortune 19.87
Paddy Power (1.00)
Party Poker (1.55)
Red Kings 0.39
Titan 1.18

The figure for mFortune is somewhat deceptive. The reason why the profits are so high from it is because it is outside of my limits. The smallest game on mFortune which I played on my android phone is 10c/20c which is ten times higher than the levels I should be playing! The format of the game on mFortune is funny too. The maximum buy-in being £8 (40 big blinds). I've also found the software to be laggy from my experience on a low end android phone and over my home wifi. I haven't found a way to review hand historys on mFortune and so I'm still convinced that in one hand someone beat my three of a kind with two pair! After that and also some very frustrating sessions where the software wouldn't respond in time and I ended up automatically folding the nuts I have decided to give mFortune a miss for now. If I'll still be interested in playing it when I've actually graduated to play at those levels I'll have to wait and see.

I did well on 888 this month, thanks largely to their 24/7 freeroll promotions which ran throughout February. I won $10.52 in tournaments on 888, practically all of my tournament winnings in February. In order to qualify for the 24/7 freerolls throughout the month I had to play a number of SNGs on 888 also, which was the first time I played SNGs since before Christmas and happily I found that I turned a profit on them also. But even with the tournament winnings I also won $5.96 in cash games on 888, which was the best I've done on that site in a long time.

My biggest disappointment this month was BetVictor on which I lost $4.15. In general I tend to do ok on this site except for two tilty sessions during the month, February 14 and 20 in which I lost a total of $12. I put that down to bad play on my part and re-buying to try to recover my losses.

The biggest improvement to my game in February was thanks to this video from PokerStrategy. The video is about simple techniques to profile opponents in micro limits game and I have found it to be an enormous help to me.

hey coogan

Keep up the grind. It's hard to stick to sometimes but long-term it'l definitely be worth it. I've taken a couple of stabs at higher limits because i ignored BRM and i unfortunately was not as lucky as you were. Which of those sites do you prefer?

I sometimes have a similar problem to you, I could have a big winning session but it only takes a few bad plays to lose all i've worked hard for. It's so easy to lose hard earned winnings especially if you tilt.

Returning to the blog after a gap of a few years. I've continued to play poker during this time and have managed to record a profit of some kind each year. I'm currently playing SnGs; $3.50 Fifty50s on Pokerstars and $1 nine-handed on 888 and made a profit of $260 this year, up from $100 the previous year. My obvious goal for next year is to increase this again. With this in mind my resolution for the new year is to make a more determined effort at training. That was really lacking this year. I've played and watched poker but didn't study it. So I'm looking to Pokerstrategy again and am going to start playing on Party Poker again and hopefully William Hill (if I can get it to work on Windows 10) to start earning some Status Points.