The Micros

   The first time I played in an online no-limit ring game was back in February 2011. I'd just registered with Fulltilt Poker when I decided it would be a good idea to try the ring games. I played in the 10c/25c game, with a buy-in of US$25 on three separate occasions, and lost my entire buy-in on three separate occasions. The games were not what I expected. My poker reading had suggested that online tables were populated by vast schools of  fish (loose-passive players, also known as 'calling stations'). Far from it. The tables were in fact, pretty tight, and I guess the only fish was me.
   So I gave up on the online ring games for quite a while, finally returning to the no-limit version of the game in March of last year. As detailed previously, I tried out both 888 and Pokerstars and finally decided that the loosest games were to be found on 888 Poker. So I've been playing more or less one session per week on 888 ever since. I started out with a hiss and a roar, winning a significant amount in the Autumn season and showing a 61% profit. After that things went downhill a bit. I had a small win in the following Autumn and the rest of the seasons showed a negative net result. The upshot of it all is that I'm about US$40 in the red after playing in this game type for about a year and a half. A poor result but I guess it could have been worse.
   After that first winning season playing in the 10c/20c games (US$20 buy-in) I decided to start playing two tables at a time. But then, after a few months, as my results took a downturn, I figured I'd better go back to concentrating on a single table again. And then, as the decline continued, around March of this year  I dropped down to the next level, and I am still playing in these 5c/10c games. This is where I intend to stay at least until the end of the year. At that point it will be time to re-assess whether or not I want to continue playing in online cashies, given my less than inspiring results.
   When I first started playing online I'd been reading quite a few poker books, which led me to believe that there was an ocean full of poker fish out there, just waiting to donate their chips. But of course, most of these books were years out of date, and many of them were based on live poker games rather than online games. But after playing in the Fulltilt games and finding tables full of  TAG (tight and aggressive) players, I decided that it must have been because I started at too-high a level. Surely the micro-stakes games would be fish heaven? Reading up on poker strategy on various websites confirmed the generally-held belief that there were loose, fishy sites to be found, if you knew where to look. 888 poker was one of the sites that was frequently listed as being one of the loosest and 'juiciest'.

   Any poker book/site/expert will tell you that if you want to find the loosest tables, you need to pay attention to the table statistics that are listed in the site lobby. In particular, the vital stat is the 'percentage of players who see the flop', something that all poker sites list. The more players there are calling and seeing the flop, the looser (and by extension, the more profitable) the table is likely to be. So it makes sense to check out the game lobby and try and get into a game with a high 'players to the flop' figure. However, in the modern era, there is a catch. It seems that every semi-serious player in the world knows this vital fact, and they are all lining up to play in these potentially profitable games, even at the micro-stakes level. As a result, any cash game with a reasonably high PTF %age has a small line-up of players on the waiting list hoping to get in and feed on the fish.
   As mentioned previously ('Cashie', 6th March 2014), I tried both 888 and Pokerstars, and found that Stars was a much tougher (and tighter) site to play on. So I stuck with 888 in the end, trolling around, trying to find the loosest tables to play on. Even here, there were a lot of players putting themselves on the waiting lists for the loosest tables, but I could usually get into a reasonably loose game. But a 'loose game' these days is nothing like the sort of game they talk about in those old poker articles. Typically, there are 5 or 6 'sitters' who wait and wait and wait for some sort of hand to raise with pre-flop, and maybe a couple of loose players who do a lot of calling and/or raising. So I'd join the sitters and wait for a chance to get in on a decent hand with the loosies. But these opportunities were few and far between. Gone are the days of limping into an inflated pot from late position with a drawing hand. It's not very often that you have the odds for that sort of thing.
   A lot of the regular players in these games are multi-tabling. You only have to flip through the player lists for different tables to see the same names turning up time and again. At this level, I don't know how much profit a poker 'grinder' could possibly make, but there still seem to be plenty of them. The margins in these not-particularly-loose games can't be very good. I guess there are positives and negatives to this situation. On the minus side, these guys are not going to get involved in a pot unless they have a positive expectation. On the plus side, if they are multi-tabling, they can't be paying close attention to what's going on at every table, which presumably leaves some sort of opening available for those smart enough to exploit it.
   So far, I have not proved to be smart enough. In fact, in recent games I've played, there has been a disturbing pattern emerging. Often I will start out ok, but then get trapped in a situation where I have a very good hand and my opponent has a better one. This is a classic no-limit trapping scenario, except that my aim is to be the trapper, not the trappee. I usually end up losing most or all of my chips and then spend the next 3 or 4 hours crawling my way back up towards the break-even point. I think the main reason I get into these situations is this: after waiting a long time for what I consider to be a good playable hand I refuse to believe that someone else has started with a better hand, or worse still, out-flopped me. This is one disadvantage of playing tight on a single table. When you finally get a good hand you don't want to release it, even if you suspect that you are behind. It's the old I-can't-believe-he-flopped-two-pair-when-I-hit-top-pair-top-kicker syndrome.
   They say that your playing style should be the opposite of the table playing style. So at a loose table, play tight and at a tight table, play loose (or at least looser than the other players). I've been trying to follow this advice recently. I've taken to playing a much wider range of hands from late position and then, if I'm up against a TAG player, attempting to bluff him out of the pot. This strategy  works sometimes, but of course if your opponent hits, you can end up in a lot of trouble. So a certain amount of caution is required. Basically, I'm just looking for some kind of edge when I play against the 'tighties'.
   The more I look at it, the more I realise that I'm making a mistake in defining a particular table as 'tight' or 'loose' and then adjusting my playing style accordingly. What I should be doing is deciding what sort of player I'm up against and adjusting my playing style to that player. This became obvious to me a few weeks ago when I was in a game that contained one chronic calling station. This player was in nearly every hand and liked nothing more than to limp in to the pot from early position, get raised, and call with virtually any two cards. His play was so obvious that I was able to exploit his weak play and I ended up with most of his chips. Then a few days after that I read an article about the importance of finding the fishy individuals and playing against them as much as possible, preferably in position. So table selection is the first step, and the next step is player selection. This is where taking notes on players becomes so important.
   So now I am working on focusing on individual players and their tendencies. First I need to look for the loosest table available. Then I need to identify who the fish are AND who the tight players are. I figure that loosening up my starting hand range is actually the right thing to do against both of these player types. After all, a looser starting range is still going to be better than the loosies' range most of the time, and it's likely to give me opportunity to play back at the tighties when they miss their high cards. Then it's a matter of adjusting my play to suit the type of player that I'm up against.
   Meanwhile, I keep working on getting my live cashie up and running again. I've played in enough online ring games to know that there is a huge difference between them and live games. Even at the micro level online there are lot more players who know at least the basics of correct play than you will ever find at a live table (at least not at the live games I play in). So it's a matter of looking for that small edge in the online games.
   I fully intend to keep on playing in online ring games on a regular basis. I'm playing at a low enough level that a continued losing streak is not going to hurt my bankroll that much. And in the meantime, I'll keep trying different strategies to get ahead. I'll play in these games at least till the end of the year and then I'll reconsider what type of game I want to play online. The chances are, I'll be looking to play in a different game type, but you never know. Maybe my new plan will turn out to be the answer to cracking the micros.