Hi,
I have been playing a lot of poker for the last few months, but I have shown little gains. I play FL micro stakes (almost exclusively SH). I have been able to take my starting $50 quite far, but I feel that my game is stagnating. I was able to take it to $750 and had bonuses that if I cleared them I would be above $1000. However, I have had two really bad tilts that totally crushed me,... The first one took me so far down that I had to start at 0.10/0.20 again, and after the second one, I'm currently griding 0.25/0.50 after having my BR drop down to about $250. My tilting is really bad and I know I have to work on them,... but aside from that, I don't believe I am a "winning" player yet. On Party Poker, I get A LOT of bonuses,... they give you free bonuses that appear at seamingly random times (I got $300 from free bonuses on top of the PS100 bonus), also I bought a $350 bonus. Without the bonuses, I would definately have busted by now.
I printed off some of my stats and my results look absolutely terrible! On 0.50/1, after 11000 hands I am -2BB/100 hands. On 0.25/0.50, after 30k hands I am +1.15BB/100 hands. I know that I have tons of leaks and I know what I must do to fix them,... but I also know that after this many hands, a winning player can easily have these stats too. So, to get reliable data I need to keep grinding until I have about 100k hands at a given limit. I would like to ask people who have grinded for hundreds of thousands of hands,... how do you do it? I feel so depressed after grinding all day and finishing with having lost 100 BB's, then grinding again all day next day and losing another 100 BB's. It feels like forever since I have had a winning session. One problem is that I could very well be a losing player and will not realize it until I play 100k hands!
I feel that there are a lot of things that discourage me as I am trying to become a good poker player,... ie. everyone who thinks poker is the same as any other form of gambling, talk about how the game is harder than it used to be, and of course losing sessions. How do you guys keep motivated day in day out? is it normal to show loses after 10k hands even if you're a winning player?
On a related note, I have read a few things on the internet about poker being a lot harder not than it was a year or two ago. Is this true? I would think it would be reasonable that poker now is harder than it was 10 or even 5 years ago and certainly harder than it was 20 years ago,... but is the game changing so much that it gets more and more difficult every year? Do you believe that there is a "saturation point" for how good a player can get in a given limit? So that eventually if everyone at the table is a 99% "perfect" player, it becomes just gambling and you are just paying for the rake?
Thanks.
