SSS vs MSS vs BSS strategy at microlimits $2NL cash games

Hello!

I'm starting to play at pokerstars ($100 bankroll) and i want to ask, to those who play there, which is the best stack strategy and period of time to play.

The 1º goal is to make $200 in 2 weeks, playing 2 hours per day.

Best regards

You want to make $10/hour playing 2nl over the course of 2 weeks?

Good luck. If you run well and have a pretty good run and play 4-5 tables at a time you could potentially make $16 over that time frame given the amount of time that you are intending to play.

Set some more realistic expectations of what is going to happen. I don't think there is any style of play that is going to net you 120-140bb's/100 hands. If you figure it out, please let me know. I would happily crush 2nl or even 5nl with that kind of win rate.

So to answer your question, there is no stack strategy or time to play that will ever accomplish the goal you have set with any kind of reliability.

Sorry, my mistake. I wanted to say 2 months! I'll play 4 tables, it's a realistic goal?

can you give me some advice, please?

I think the best stack strategy is just play the lowest stake.
I think the best time is when those sharks sleep.

bradwilk said:

Sorry, my mistake. I wanted to say 2 months! I'll play 4 tables, it's a realistic goal?

can you give me some advice, please?

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Set your goal in number of hands and not on a time frame. $200 in 2NL is winning 10BB/100 over like 100k hands I think which would be crushing and would take many hours of play.

If you have an edge over the player pool at 2nl and have an idea about how to play deep then buying in for the maximum (250bb) will lead to the most profit.

You could come close to that.

If you can crush those stakes for 10bb/100 consistently, run well with low variance, then you would end up playing around 32,000 hands over that time frame. If you can crush those stake then you could make $200.

The evening is better, people are off work and the tables will be more full. I would play 100bb's. If you are able to crush for 10/100 then you want that full stack to be able to maximize your gain on your opponents mistakes. While it will be slightly higher variance than the smaller stake strategies, you should have enough volume to make up for that.

You will likely fall short of $200, but only by $15-$20. Its not a bad goal to set, but a more reasonable goal might be $150.

I think an even better goal would be to focus on proper decision making, or on a winrate, rather than a dollar value.

If money is what you are looking for, then you should go get a part time job for a couple hours a night, probably pays better than $2.25-$2.40 an hour.

EDIT - Micromachine is right, 250 is better than 100, I wasn't even thinking deepstack.

May be I have not seen this but I don't think you have deep stack at micros 2NL / 4NL... Not atleast in PokerStars. or am I missing something here?

skrsh76 said:

May be I have not seen this but I don't think you have deep stack at micros 2NL / 4NL... Not atleast in PokerStars. or am I missing something here?

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Yeah you do, you can buy in from between 40bb and 250bb on the Stars 2nl and 5nl tables.

bradwilk said:

Sorry, my mistake. I wanted to say 2 months! I'll play 4 tables, it's a realistic goal?

can you give me some advice, please?

Click to expand...

My advice is to focus on what's important. Winning $200 is not, at least not in the context of your poker "career". It's probably not very important even as a fairly short-term goal since it's not likely to make any meaningful difference in your life.

Until you're playing for amounts of money that actually matter in your life, focus on learning and improving, not on setting arbitrary $ goals that don't particularly matter.

Can you easily afford to flush $100 down the toilet?

If yes, then don't bother with 2nl, go straight to 5nl or higher and pray for a good run.

If no, then dissuade yourself of the notion (delusion) that there is some magic bullet that can be learned to make poker a magic ATM machine.

You simply must put in the effort to understand both the game, and how you, personally, deal with the ebb and flow of things at the tables. Effort in this case equates to hands played. Learning in this case will be causal and can be increased with serious self evaluation and study, i.e. the more you self evaluate, the faster you will learn what you need to learn. Study will mean trying to figure out how and why you lose hands, and win hands, along with reading everything you can. This goes way beyond simply the cards were in your favor or his (aka variance).

IPlay said:

Set your goal in number of hands and not on a time frame. $200 in 2NL is winning 10BB/100 over like 100k hands I think which would be crushing and would take many hours of play.

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How can i do that? It's quite dificult to calculate the winning ratio without pokertracker or HManager, which i don't have...

Ubercroz said:

You could come close to that.

If you can crush those stakes for 10bb/100 consistently, run well with low variance, then you would end up playing around 32,000 hands over that time frame. If you can crush those stake then you could make $200.

The evening is better, people are off work and the tables will be more full. I would play 100bb's. If you are able to crush for 10/100 then you want that full stack to be able to maximize your gain on your opponents mistakes. While it will be slightly higher variance than the smaller stake strategies, you should have enough volume to make up for that.

You will likely fall short of $200, but only by $15-$20. Its not a bad goal to set, but a more reasonable goal might be $150.

I think an even better goal would be to focus on proper decision making, or on a winrate, rather than a dollar value.

If money is what you are looking for, then you should go get a part time job for a couple hours a night, probably pays better than $2.25-$2.40 an hour.

EDIT - Micromachine is right, 250 is better than 100, I wasn't even thinking deepstack.

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Good tips, thank you.
Just two more things:
-Should i use auto-rebuy or play sss and mss in a bad start to a session?
-I know that is a controversial question but, in geral, of which country are the worst players?

I don't know what country the worst players are from. the good news is that all the worst players from all the countries play at 2nl.

Auto rebuy, don't worry about a bad start to a session. It sounds like you are being highly results oriented in the way you are approaching this. don't do that or you will find yourself trying to do things that are suboptimal in the hopes that you will win this hand you are in now.

Arjonius said:

My advice is to focus on what's important. Winning $200 is not, at least not in the context of your poker "career". It's probably not very important even as a fairly short-term goal since it's not likely to make any meaningful difference in your life.

Until you're playing for amounts of money that actually matter in your life, focus on learning and improving, not on setting arbitrary $ goals that don't particularly matter.

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I know. I just want to have a goal to guide my learning process, like discipline! First - to learn bankroll management and second - discipline play!

making 200$ in 2 weeks starting at 2nl can be done , i did it at the start of my bankroll challenge back in the autumn



i did it by buying in for 250 bbs , overbetting the hell out of monsters vs fishand playing most of the hands late at night, and 10 tabling 2and 5nl full ring with a 6max style.

The downside is .......a noob trying to play this style without being able to hand read, value bet, pot control etc is going to spew so much money that they will be bust in a session or two.

this was the graph a couple of days later 22nd october to 7th november

Well done sir!
By the way, what's the name of that software?

its holdemanager2 www.holdemmanager.com . you can get a months free trial . Its competitor is pokertracker4 www.pokertracker.com and they also do a months free trial ( but with a f***ing annoying "this is a trial" message over your tables. If i was doing the trial i'd insta swap to HEM2 . why annoy the hell out of your prospective customers.

I own both and my personal preference is HEM2 however for most people its a choice of which they prefer. what one person likes will annoy another person.

you probably did see me , had a something blow in my eye and eye was aching, blinking a lot so dropped down.. It was 20 buyins and move up( may have been some vip cashs included i cant remember exactly , but it was ~40$ at 2nl and 100$ at 5nl to move up). 2 and 5nl FR are relatively easy to abuse with lots of loose passives. . I was also starting a lot of tables and staying on tables as people left them. at those stakes the typical FR player doesn't adjust their ranges to number of players on the table , so so you can play 6 max style with 6 or fewer players on the table and the FR regs are still opening tyheir FR ranges etc and they just aren't used to the amount of 3 and 4 betting that i was doing.
10nl FR and you run into a wall of nits and that agro 6max style into better nits just doesn't go well.once they get a sample on you playing that loose and it won't take that long with them all multi tabling and they started adjusting. then i switched back over to 10nl 6max and carried on.

If you look at the session start times (uk) then you can see that the evenings were way more profitable than the daytimes. I.e playing against drunks/recs home from work as opposed to daytimes when likely to be students and eastern european grinders mass tabling the micros.

bradwilk said:

I know. I just want to have a goal to guide my learning process, like discipline! First - to learn bankroll management and second - discipline play!

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Then set goals that are as directly connected as possible to the areas you want to improve. How directly does winning $X relate to implementing BRM in a manner that's appropriate for you? BRM isn't even primarily about winning; it's more about being able to absorb downswings.

Or how directly does how much you win relate to playing a more disciplined game? Yes, improving you discipline is likely to make you a better player and thus to improve your win rate. However, it's pretty tenuous to say it will result in winning a certain amount in a certain time. Wouldn't it be better to figure out what kinds of things you need to do to be more disciplined (e.g. limp less), and to set goals based on measuring those things?

this was the positional stats .As you can see by comparing the blinds vs UTG hands i played an awful lot of heads up and 3 handed poker on the full ring tables and relatively little on a full table.short handed play also skews the vpip/pfr stats in the blinds as well.

Arjonius said:

Then set goals that are as directly connected as possible to the areas you want to improve. How directly does winning $X relate to implementing BRM in a manner that's appropriate for you? BRM isn't even primarily about winning; it's more about being able to absorb downswings.

Or how directly does how much you win relate to playing a more disciplined game? Yes, improving you discipline is likely to make you a better player and thus to improve your win rate. However, it's pretty tenuous to say it will result in winning a certain amount in a certain time. Wouldn't it be better to figure out what kinds of things you need to do to be more disciplined (e.g. limp less), and to set goals based on measuring those things?

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Winning $x it's the goal because i want to move up limit.I want to move up to NL5 because I fell comfortable playing those limits, but today iv'e just $120 and i think isn't enough to deal with downsings of just 28 Buy-ins.
I'm not obsessed with winning money right now, i just don't feel motivated to play NL2.

I think you got me wrong. Maybe i have expressed myself wrong, but what i wanted to say is that i want to keep learning, theory and discipline, but in order to do that i need to have motivation. I've read books and blogs, í've saw videos and i've been playing a lot but in my opinion NL2 isn't stimulant to the learning process. That's why i set the $200 goal, it's a means to an end. Earn the money to move up level and then go on with my learning process.

bradwilk said:

Winning $x it's the goal because i want to move up limit.I want to move up to NL5 because I fell comfortable playing those limits, but today iv'e just $120 and i think isn't enough to deal with downsings of just 28 Buy-ins.
I'm not obsessed with winning money right now, i just don't feel motivated to play NL2.

I think you got me wrong. Maybe i have expressed myself wrong, but what i wanted to say is that i want to keep learning, theory and discipline, but in order to do that i need to have motivation. I've read books and blogs, í've saw videos and i've been playing a lot but in my opinion NL2 isn't stimulant to the learning process. That's why i set the $200 goal, it's a means to an end. Earn the money to move up level and then go on with my learning process.

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you might as well give up now if the bolded is your attitude. its the easiest place to make money , to learn how to crush fish, to hone your value betting skills but by the sound of it your EGO means that you think you are too good to play there.

you are asking about what strategy to use, whether to use auto rebuy, how much to huy in with etc ....these questions all point to you having relatively little experience and/or knowledge.

You say you want to learn bankroll managemnt , but you're yet to set your move up and move back down numbers for your anticipated poker journey.You say that you want to get 200$ so you can move up to 5nl .....but don't feel motivated to play 2nl .....How do you think you are going to get to 5nl then without playing 2nl if you aren't playing 5nl on your current bankroll.

The last line you put is so incredibly stupid. why postpone your learning until after you move up to 5nl. you should be learning all the time that you play, you should be observing your opponents , watching how they play their hands , how you can exploit the way that they play, if they give any tells ...i.e donk bet 1bb on the flop and fold to a raise. Learn how these incredibly bad players misplay their hands and you can use it to profit for the rest of your career. your money in general at whatever stake will come from the bad players. they are the ones you have to learn to crush because as you move up they will get less and less of them , and more there will be more good players fighting to get their share of the bad players money.

Why can't you learn how to set mine at 2nl, who you can steal off , how you can defend against steals, how to use your hud , how to make use of notes etc.