New Limits

It's been a few days since my last post on moving up in limits. I've given it some thought and I think I will move up, but not to 10-20. I am going to try the 5-10 games. I may also have to try the 6 max games at 3-6 and 5-10. Party Poker has just opened the 3-6 6 max games and according to the message boards, all of the bad players from the full 5-10 games have moved down to the 6 max games at 3-6.

My decision comes down to my hatred of losing money. I think I would need to slowly adjust to the higher limits so I don't go crazy when I have a losing session of 20 BB's. at 5-10 that is only $200. At 10-20 that would be $400 which is like a bad Vegas trip. Once I play around 10,000 hands at these levels, I will reevaluate. Hopefully the new broadcast of the WSOP 2005 on ESPN in July will stir up all the fish again and there will be even more new players on the net.

An interesting thing happened while playing a Sit-n-Go over the weekend. There were 5 left with similar chip stacks. I was on the button with 99 and UTG raised all in. It would have taken 95% of my stack to call him. I still had a lot of chips left and I felt like it would be a coin flip if I call. I decided to adhere to the cardinal rule of sits which is raise when folded to and fold when raised to.

Later I wanted to see if that was a good play, so I posted the hand history on 2+2. There were a few off the cuff responses, but one guy put up an analysis using ICM and poker stove. I had seen ICM but I was not aware that poker stove was free. I did the long hand version of my EV on the hand on paper and it came out slightly ahead for me to call. If you plug in the numbers to ICM it truly becomes a coin flip because if you lose, you are out of the tournament. The great thing is that poker stove will do the EV calculations for me automatically. So now I have a new toy.

On another topic, I have been following the results of the World Series of Poker closely and I am amazed at how many pros are still wading through the fields of thousands and taking down these titles. The fact that Doyle Brunson, Johnny Chan, Barry Greenstein, and Phil Ivey have won bracelets this year is a true testament that the balance between skill and luck in poker, is still heavily weighted in the skill category. I can't wait to see how the main event turns out.