Barely Ahead of Pace

Well, this month has not gone as I had hoped, although I suppose it could be worse. The project that I had mentioned in my post from two weeks ago was that I decided that it would be a good idea to learn how to play the 20bb cap games on Stars and take a bit of a playing break, seeing as I continued to bleed money.

It seemed like a good idea to have as an option to crank out some VPP's when I'm tired or not playing my A game at 100bb for whatever reason. I have found the pace for SNE to sometimes have me playing an hour or two a day when I am not at my best and I figured that since its significantly easier to play 20bb poker that I could sub out that 20-30% of suboptimal play with 20bb since the VPP rates for cap are very similar at the same blind levels to 100bb. I started doing poker math to figure out optimal calling and shoving ranges for common spots. This was the first time in a long time I did anything like this and it was enjoyable to get some brain exercise like that, but there is a good chance all of this was for naught.

I didn't do my due diligence before I jumped into figuring out the game. I had seen winrates from top shortstackers at 1.5-2.5 PTBB at smallish stakes and figured even 1PTBB would be fine for my purposes and that I could achieve that. What I didn't factor in is that most of that play is from a time when you could buy in for 20bb at deepstack games and that the top cap players are making .5-1PTBB. I ran some simulations and discovered that this was unlikely to be a profitable venture without heavy game selection or being the very best. And even so, with the high variance and low winrates it may take 800k hands to even know if you are likely to be a long term winner. So, while I may pick up this later in the year if the cap games stay fish heavy (because I am sure that every reg is +EV with a big fish at a 6max table, even with only 20bbs) for now I decided to do something else.

The past week or so, and for the rest of the month, 100nl will be the game of choice. With all of the slow bleeding I have had this year I decided I needed to play something I can win at for sure to build up confidence and rehab my game. I've played about 40k hands of 100nl this month and am up 21 buyins, so things are looking OK for now, minus the fact that the VPP rate is abysmally low at .34. Eventually I have to get better and be able to play mostly 200nl, if not some 400nl to keep up with things.

VPP COUNT: 144250