Playing NL2 for over half a year - should i move up or stay?

[Vengar86]

Hello Poker Community,

I have been playing poker online for over half a year now. My overall winnings are not outstanding but i can consistently win some coffee money on the side by casually playing NL2.
I have a ton of experience at these stakes now, so i just want to know your opinion:
I want to become better at poker, so that one day i can make a consistent side income with it. (Of course i would love to be able to play it professionally one day, but i wanted to set a more realistic goal for the near future.)
So is playing at NL2 in my free time going to help me with that?

Im gonna list some of my experiences with these stakes.

1. I tend to get on tilt too easily sometimes, not because i have a losing session, but because i just cant believe how obvious some people are almost screaming their cards to you .

2. I underbluff, but i will fire another bullet on the turn if i picked up equity, and i have also triple barrel bluffed a few times with - lets say - mixed results.
bluffing in general is not that bad, if youre careful who you are targeting on what kind of board texture and if you heavily slow down on turn/river. (Especially river, i have seen absolute madness on that street)
Additionaly it works quite beautifully for your value bets if you have been caught bluffing here and then.

My biggest losses from bluffing tend to come if i 3bet a limper with AK/AQ, get called and then on a dry board get snap called on the flop but i still fire that second bullet and get snap called again. I just get so angry whenever that happens. I then mostly check river and vomit as i fold to the 1/2 pot jam or see my opponent check back bottom pair

3. I talk myself into questionable calls on the river sometimes (how ironic )

4. I got better at it but i probalby still dont fold enough to the highly unbalanced raises (especially postflop; preflop is so nitty i comfortably fold 1010 and AK OOP against most opponents)

5. My best time with NL2 is if i play like 2 hours every evening, 3-4 tables, and stop when my concentration goes down. I make like 100BB per session on average by using this approach. I have very bad experiences with really long grinding sessions!



Now back to my question:
I have played a little NL5 and NL 10 and i would be bankrolled for this, but i just dont feel all that comfortable there, eventhough i have net profit on both stakes.
The reason is that there is a really confusing mixture of good and bad, passive and
hyperaggressive players here. (Though Bluffing works better.)

Especially NL5 is quite confusing: There is more 3betting, but just when i think that a guy knows what hes doing he turns out to be the biggest fish at the table.
And then you run into a guy who just exploits the average player type by for instance traping AA. I got caught completely offguard multiple times as most players just go crazy with that hand.
Its just very hard to keep track of who is playing average and who is outsmarting the table. The fish are still plenty here though, which is why i have been decent overall.

NL2 is easier, because nearly everyone is playing passive and bad, and then there is the occasional maniac fish sometimes as well.


Should i actually play NL5 or NL10 to get better and perhaps someday make it to NL25?
I fear that playing too much NL2 could turn you into a robotic player, with leaks and tendencies in your game that you take as a default unable to change or even notice it as you move up in stakes.

 

[VMVarga]

Half a year is not all that much time, in terms of online poker playing, especially if you are only playing two hours per day. A better metric is hands played. The old rule I always hear is to not make any judgments about the skill of a player until he or she has played at least 100k hands.

Going on tilt is not always that obvious. You can be on tilt and not even really know it. That is soft tilt. Hard tilt is what most people consider "tilt." That is when you just really get mad and upset and you just can't play any hand with good decision making. It just takes time and experience to be able to approach the game in the exact mental and emotional state you'd like to play in. Meditation can help you control those things, but it also takes time to practice.

There is bluffing, and there is c-betting. They are related, but not necessarily the same. A c-bet with no made hand is a lot like a bluff. But when you do things like float to 4th and 5th street with no made hand and no real draws, with plans to represent whatever better made hand might appear on the board as its texture changes from street to street to showdown, you are bluffing for sure. The post flop c-bet is similar, but different in the sense that if you are called, you can still back out and avoid more disastrous results that usually occur on 5th street/showdown bluffs gone wrong. You also have the opportunity to turn the c-bet/semi bluff type betting into a made hand with draws or just plain lucky turns and rivers. So, making a c-bet with only a backdoor flush draw might seem like a bluff/semi bluff, but if you runner runner the backdoor flush, you are about as far from a bluff as you can get. But if your backdoor flush does not come, you might get a card on the river that still allows you to make a good bluff attempt, while holding no made hand at all.

The players at higher stakes with more skill and experience are just going to be far more unpredictable than most players at lower stakes. They have so much experience taking in all of the information being conveyed, inadvertently or otherwise, that this whole game starts to become like second nature to them, and so they can sit and play for 8 to 10 hours a day and stay sharp the entire time because they are able to almost effortlessly accomplish a lot of the things that less skilled and less experienced players require considerably more effort and concentration to do. They have seen way more hands and have played with way more players, and they can use this to their advantage by having far more knowledge about all of the potential moves their opponents might try to make on them.

The only thing that will turn you into a robotic player is yourself. Whether you are sticking to low and micro stakes, or you are dabbling in mid and high stakes to try to get a feel for where you are trying to go, it is up to you how you play and what habits and patterns you exhibit, and how you play around with them in order to try to make yourself harder to pin down and predict

You mentioned a lot about how it was confusing and hard to predict what the players might be doing and what cards they might be playing with. You don't really want to be trying to pin down the exact two cards that your opponents have, but instead to narrow down a potential "range" of card combinations that a particular player might be playing. If you see the player folding UTG for a relatively prolonged period of time, only to see them limp or open with a raise UTG, you might be able to predict what their potential range for UTG opens is, just by noticing that the player rarely ever plays from that position, and by noting what they do play with whenever you get to see their cards at showdown. Because that is the most vulnerable position, most players commit to only playing it with their premium range of card combos, like AJ-AK suit/off, or pairs from 8s to aces for example. But if you notice the player is playing almost any two UTG, just to try to mix it up and seem more unpredictable, you can exploit that too and use that info to your advantage. This doesn't always work, as this game of ours has such a strong component of luck involved, but it is sort of like getting AA: most of the time it should work out well for you, but we all know that it cannot work out every single time. And the more advanced the player pool, the more difficult time you will have using the information conveyed at the table to your advantage, as the higher the skill level, the more effort and work is being put into trying to remain unpredictable to opponents.

I'm not really a big cash game player, but I think what one might tell you to do is to slowly enter the next stake level you are eyeing. Don't just fully commit to the higher stake games, instead decide on a percentage of the overall time you plan on playing that day or that week and only play, for example, 10% of your time in the higher stake level. After that time is up, go back to playing at the lower level. Then just slowly increase that % to whatever you feel comfortable with, while slowly acclimating to the differences between the stake levels, like a slow taper upward. That is a pretty smart way to do it, I think; it helps you keep roll management rules in tact while also helping you get used to the higher stakes.

 

[Looking2Learn]

Move up man

I feel your pain with the tilt... It's literally something I focus the most on. I set myself a 3 buy in rule no questions and I'm out for a minimum 2 hour break... walk outside, watch a film. Something other than poker... I might even study instead of play after I return..

I have tilted off my bankroll twice in the past... it's not a nice feeling. I literally threw my money across the table in pure blind rage... chasing my losses. moved up stakes in anger.. the worst... I haven't done this in some time now which means I'm learning but I'll never take my eye off it again. I read the mental game of poker which has some great stuff in it.

Anyway best of luck

 

[Vengar86]

Half a year is not all that much time, in terms of online poker playing, especially if you are only playing two hours per day. A better metric is hands played. The old rule I always hear is to not make any judgments about the skill of a player until he or she has played at least 100k hands.

Going on tilt is not always that obvious. You can be on tilt and not even really know it. That is soft tilt. Hard tilt is what most people consider "tilt." That is when you just really get mad and upset and you just can't play any hand with good decision making. It just takes time and experience to be able to approach the game in the exact mental and emotional state you'd like to play in. Meditation can help you control those things, but it also takes time to practice.

There is bluffing, and there is c-betting. They are related, but not necessarily the same. A c-bet with no made hand is a lot like a bluff. But when you do things like float to 4th and 5th street with no made hand and no real draws, with plans to represent whatever better made hand might appear on the board as its texture changes from street to street to showdown, you are bluffing for sure. The post flop c-bet is similar, but different in the sense that if you are called, you can still back out and avoid more disastrous results that usually occur on 5th street/showdown bluffs gone wrong. You also have the opportunity to turn the c-bet/semi bluff type betting into a made hand with draws or just plain lucky turns and rivers. So, making a c-bet with only a backdoor flush draw might seem like a bluff/semi bluff, but if you runner runner the backdoor flush, you are about as far from a bluff as you can get. But if your backdoor flush does not come, you might get a card on the river that still allows you to make a good bluff attempt, while holding no made hand at all.

The players at higher stakes with more skill and experience are just going to be far more unpredictable than most players at lower stakes. They have so much experience taking in all of the information being conveyed, inadvertently or otherwise, that this whole game starts to become like second nature to them, and so they can sit and play for 8 to 10 hours a day and stay sharp the entire time because they are able to almost effortlessly accomplish a lot of the things that less skilled and less experienced players require considerably more effort and concentration to do. They have seen way more hands and have played with way more players, and they can use this to their advantage by having far more knowledge about all of the potential moves their opponents might try to make on them.

The only thing that will turn you into a robotic player is yourself. Whether you are sticking to low and micro stakes, or you are dabbling in mid and high stakes to try to get a feel for where you are trying to go, it is up to you how you play and what habits and patterns you exhibit, and how you play around with them in order to try to make yourself harder to pin down and predict

You mentioned a lot about how it was confusing and hard to predict what the players might be doing and what cards they might be playing with. You don't really want to be trying to pin down the exact two cards that your opponents have, but instead to narrow down a potential "range" of card combinations that a particular player might be playing. If you see the player folding UTG for a relatively prolonged period of time, only to see them limp or open with a raise UTG, you might be able to predict what their potential range for UTG opens is, just by noticing that the player rarely ever plays from that position, and by noting what they do play with whenever you get to see their cards at showdown. Because that is the most vulnerable position, most players commit to only playing it with their premium range of card combos, like AJ-AK suit/off, or pairs from 8s to aces for example. But if you notice the player is playing almost any two UTG, just to try to mix it up and seem more unpredictable, you can exploit that too and use that info to your advantage. This doesn't always work, as this game of ours has such a strong component of luck involved, but it is sort of like getting AA: most of the time it should work out well for you, but we all know that it cannot work out every single time. And the more advanced the player pool, the more difficult time you will have using the information conveyed at the table to your advantage, as the higher the skill level, the more effort and work is being put into trying to remain unpredictable to opponents.

I'm not really a big cash game player, but I think what one might tell you to do is to slowly enter the next stake level you are eyeing. Don't just fully commit to the higher stake games, instead decide on a percentage of the overall time you plan on playing that day or that week and only play, for example, 10% of your time in the higher stake level. After that time is up, go back to playing at the lower level. Then just slowly increase that % to whatever you feel comfortable with, while slowly acclimating to the differences between the stake levels, like a slow taper upward. That is a pretty smart way to do it, I think; it helps you keep roll management rules in tact while also helping you get used to the higher stakes.

Thanks for your long answer, especially that advice at the end.

I just want to clarify a few things: When i talk about bluffing on the flop i mean every unmade hand. I am balancing my range in a pretty high stakes approved manner by c-bet-bluffing all Draws and most backdoor flush draws, also i will C-bet dry boards pretty much 100% and depending on my opponent will c-bet a little less if they are sticky on the flop, especially if the board favors their range.

And of course im not trying to put my opponents on specific hands, although at NL2 my hand-reading abililty is astonishing sometimes. I will for instance pretty much always fold the river with a hand that does not beat any value bets in opponents range. Its not always easy though, because some opponents really overplay middling pocket pairs and second pair. And the maniac fish can literally show up with any two cards.

They are also the biggest example in terms of "chasing every gutshot". You miss some good bluffing opportunities on the river because you never know if they snap-called top pair or a weak draw. As mentioned in my previous post i am VERY SELECTIVE with my river bluffs.

The term confusing was referring to the Unpredictability in terms of play styles and skill at NL5 that is really a big difference to NL2.

 

[Vengar86]

I feel your pain with the tilt... It's literally something I focus the most on. I set myself a 3 buy in rule no questions and I'm out for a minimum 2 hour break... walk outside, watch a film. Something other than poker... I might even study instead of play after I return..

I have tilted off my bankroll twice in the past... it's not a nice feeling. I literally threw my money across the table in pure blind rage... chasing my losses. moved up stakes in anger.. the worst... I haven't done this in some time now which means I'm learning but I'll never take my eye off it again. I read the mental game of poker which has some great stuff in it.

Anyway best of luck

Been there. including blowing winnings of two weeks in one session, and the good old, "I'll move up to higher stakes to quickly win it back".

I have been able to control it lately by playing relatively fixed sessions of smt. like 2 hours and stop when it feels like i should call it a day (no matter if im up or down).
The long sessions have really killed me in the past.

 

[Weicester]

I am probably going to get some backlashes for this, but my advice is: play at the stakes you're most comfortable at.

I cannot play at NL2. I just can't. I can't win there. Over thousands of hands I barely break even. At NL5 I feel much more comfortable, because there people are actually letting me exploit them.

HM2 flags me as having a loose passive playing style. Sure, this is supposed to be the weakest style of them all. But I play 1-2 tables at NL5 and with my playing style I can just exploit fish and weak regulars by being the most unpredictable guy at the table.

I would balance my c-bet range a bit tho if I were you. I am currently at 58% over the last 10k hands. Don't know if this is too low or not, but yours is definitely too high.

 

[Vengar86]

Last time i checked my C-bets it was a 64%.
Of course I check fold sometimes. I check middling pairs a lot, sometimes i check-call weak top pairs and strong draws. And against more than 2 Opponents i check nearly all unmade hands. I used to barrel too much, but because there are a lot of stations at NL2 i dumped it down a bit.
But i feel like if i go lower i would miss too many opportunities to attack all of those crappy hands my opponents have on average. And on the flop they actually know where the fold button is at times

 

[Smokewood]

2NL is a waste of time. Seriously, might as well be playing with fake money.
You have to play at a level where you are scared to lose.
I would kill myself before playing 2NL for 6 months.
Move up to AT LEAST 50NL - then you'll know where you stand!