Bad EV Meta-Decisions

I realized for the last few months, I've been making awful EV decisions. I've actually be playing just fine, more than fine. I'm winning somewhere around 3-5 big blinds / 100 hands online, and 5-7 per hour live. But, the problem was I was playing well below my bankroll in games that were just so easy that I was passing up better EV games to play in them. Wasting time in such live games is bad enough, but even after stopping that, I was still doing it online!

Anyway, so two days ago, I started trying to figure out why. Online, it started because I didn't want to fully trust the online sites while UIGEA ticked towards full implementation. After cashing out during the frenzy, I decided a few weeks later to put $200 into each site and build it up. I've labored in the pathetically $40-$60 buy-in NL HE games, playing deep stack when I could find it, and I've got about a grand on each site now.

That's not too shabby for a few months of work at 10-15 hours a week at those limits. But I've been wasting my time.

These games are filled with Level 1 players, who who are still confused about what hand opponents are actually representing when they bet (of course, at these limits, those opponents nearly always have what they are representing, too). I can play six tables at once and keep the EV the same. It's just easy and mindless. It's so easy that it makes me question my assertions that bots can't be written to beat low-stakes NL HE games the way they can beat low limit games easily. I think I was that bot that past few months.

I finally got fed up two nights ago. I decided that I'm not going to do this prefect and correct bankroll management online. I certainly won't cash out until I get to $3,000 or so per site (just in case my deposit methods stop working as I suspect they might RSN), but I'm not going to try to eek my way back through the baby stakes again, respecting some sort of 20 buy-in rule on each site as I have been. If I get screwed by the UIGEA and can't buy-in again, I'll move on and start playing live a few nights a week again.

I did technically have +EV playing these games, but in a relative sense, it wasn't. I should have been in the $200 and $400 buy-in games. My skill level is completely adequate to beat those games. There are always a few totally clueless players floating around those limits, anyway (usually the pointless hyper-aggressive types online who have never folded QQ preflop in their life). The rest are mostly the would-be “good players”, who are my favorite to play against, anyway. They are so easy to read because they rarely deviate from the obvious starting hand selection, and they have won enough times that they don't realize that they have so much more to learn. (Every 1/2 game, live and online, I've ever seen is filled with these people, but online, you can get plenty of hands per hour and lots of rake back, and I don't have to listen to their incessant whining about how good they are.)

So, I'm done with the baby stakes, probably permanently. This whole multi-table volume play is a grind that doesn't seem to earn beyond theoretical maximums anyway. Plus, at the higher limits, I can actually use more of my skills. I can stay on Level 2 pretty much constantly, and often find myself in Level 3 territory. At 1/2 NL HE online, you can actually find some Level 2 players here and there, and it allows your full range of skills to take hold. At the baby stakes, it's just “do the obvious, rinse, repeat”. (For those of you that play live mostly, it turns out that online, the players are slightly better for the given stakes because the selection factor is higher on the player pool.)

I had, frankly, somehow totally forgotten you could earn money at poker by being actually smarter than other people, rather than just not being a total idiot. Let the sea of fad NL HE players that learned the bare minimum rake up the chips at the baby limits for me; I'll stick around low-to-medium and it'll still be relatively easy pickings. Now, if I could just get back the past few months...

Anyway, my point is, you can play perfectly and still be a donkey, because you might not actually be maximizing your skills by playing too low. That's the moral here, I think. Rory pointed this out to me in a comment years ago; I'll dig it up later and post an update.