More on Table selecting

At long last, after months and months of losing sessions, I managed to book a win last night. OK, it was only really 6 sessions of losses in a row, and this one win makes up for at least the last 3 of those. It wasn't a huge win, but those others weren't huge losses either.

Nothing major to report in terms of play, but I am getting a feeling for when to go and when to slow down at this lower level. You hear some people say micro players don't value bet enough, but I think my problem is the opposite, where I value bet and get called with the worst hand quite a lot. I'm basically never giving guys credit for calling with AK/AQ pre flop (rather than raising), but it happens a lot with some players and you need to identify these situations. I'm now finally letting go of value betting those hands, and betting other marginal spots where I don't think I'm getting folds ever, and focusing more on maximising value when I get hands, which should be an ideal tactic at NL10 at least.

Another ideal tactic at any level is table selection. Some would argue it isn't necessary at NL10/NL25, so I'll spend a couple of lines explaining why that's not true. Firstly, what they are saying is you don't need to table select at NL10 to beat it. That's true. I never table selected much up to NL50 and have been a winner there. But beating something is not as good as beating it convincingly. I always wondered what the big difference between me and the guys crushing NL50 were, and I think it comes down to being the complete player, which definitley includes table selecting hard.

So first of all, back in the old days (up until late last week), I'd look for up to 4 tables in the lobby that had high flop % and high $ and join it, probably spending my whole session playing those same 4 tables, unless something was clearly not good there. I'd invariably find I'd be up on 2, down on 2. I was definitely noticing the two I'd be down on, I was either getting 3 bet a lot, called in position a lot, or the table was full of TAG's (or at least TAG wannabees, which still isn't good). Occasionally it was a juicy table and I was just getting unlucky, but not as much.

So lets look at some maths there. If I played 2 tables, at 5BB/100 hands, I'd be making around 10BB/hr (woohoo $1). So the obvious happens and you move to 4 tables, and still win at 4BB/100, slightly less than before because you are a little more rushed. Still you are winning more than before per hour, now up to 16BB/hr. You have open one juicy table, two tight weak tables and one mixed table with a couple of real donks and a few decent players. 16BB/hr, no real breaks in play, no extra work than firing up tables and playing.

Now we do the reverse. We table select religously. Because of the extra work, we can only do two tables at first, and we will have some downtime, sitting on waiting lists and quitting tables that turn TAGgy or break down. But with table selection we will always be sitting down on fishy tables, so quite a lot of the time we have 2 very fishy tables open, way more downtime. Now the fishy tables are really worth 15BB/100 to us, so all up it's a potential of 30BB/hr. But given downtime we'd have to bring that down to something like 20BB/hr.

These figures are of course made up and may not be true, but think of the benefits of table selecting:
* You've just increased your hourly expectation playing less tables
* You are always playing the donks rather than playing TAG's on table, LAG's on another and donks on the other
* You are always expected to earn money, rather than some nights getting unlucky and playing 4 bad tables
* Once you are comfortable you can still 4+ table with good table selection and really up the earning rate
* Because you are practicing table selection so strongly at NL10, it will be part of your game once you move up in levels where it really is important

Tomorrow I'll have a look at a few reasons I've stupidly avoided table selection in the past, but I can safely say, even though I probably still didn't table select perfectly last night, I certainly ended up on some fishy tables, and can't complain about that at all.