Can I evaluate my poker skills in micro limit games?

I am fairly new to poker and decided that I would start out in the smallest limit, and get comfortable and good at those limits before moving up. I have now been playing for about 3 weeks, and am consistently losing.

I do not profess to be a great poker player, but I don't think I am as bad as my bankroll is telling me. I am trying to play the game properly, which means that when I am playing with a 20 cent pot, and some idiot raises it $1.50, unless I know I have the nuts, I fold. Often I then find out that the other player had absolutely nothing and I had him easily beat.

This then gets me frustrated and the next time I find myself in the same position I call him, this time to find out he did indeed have the nuts.

As you can imagine, this is getting very frustrating and I am questioning what to do from here. My questions for the forums (I know that you have very little information, but I am looking for a general answer from others experience).

Am I needing more experience and practice reading my opponents and therefore should remain at the micro limits tables until I am consistently winning on those tables before moving up?

Or is my assumption correct that I cannot correctly evaluate my play at these micro limits due to the erratic play, and I would be better off increasing my bankroll and playing some higher limit tables? If this is the case, what level am I looking at before I can adequately evaluate my game? How much bankroll would be recommended for that level?

Although micro limits present a great learning opportunity, I think you have to move up to check your skill level. The reason is there are a handful of people who don't take low limits seriously. I mean, would you go all in preflop with 88 for 25 cents? Maybe. What about for $2500? Probably not. Although don't think that higher limits necessarily have better players, it's just players with more money.

Ok, Behrens, thats really bad advice. Dont move up. Its just plain stupid.

Instead work with your leaks. You are recognising them, thats the first step towards fixing them.
Your opponents are using classic poker psycology against you, dont fall for it. If they want to risk all their stack to win 10cent off you, just be patient, let them bluff, stick to your game, and trap them when you actually have something.

By the way a good player should be able to make around 10BB/100hands (BB=Big Bets=2big blinds).
That means if you are playing one table at the lowest level, typicly around 60hands/hr, your profit would be 24c/hr.
If you stick to your tight agressive, patient ABC poker you will have a chance to get make a micro profit.
Then after grinding for a long time you will be more than prepared to start moving up the stakes.

I agree with only_bridge that you should stay at 2nl. That is the place to learn and practice. If you cannot beat that level, I do not believe that you will beat higher levels. Just my 2 cents fwiw....

I agree. Some of these players are probably just playing stupid, but some might be trapping you on purpose. Unless you can tell wich is wich, stay at the lower limit.

Thanks for the advice, From what I am reading, I am taking it that a professional (if they were to play this level) would be able to average about 24cents an hour profit at this level? I realise that this is only a ball park and of course there will be losing hours, and winning hours, but I should be looking at achieving 100 hours of play with approx $24 profit before I move up to the next level?

Next question would be, what is the best way for me to improve my game at the present time? Is their a particular book I should read? Should I be concentrating on one part of the game (sounds like I need to be working on reading people at the table and table position, is that correct)? Any particular posts that I should concentrate on? There seems to be such a huge amount of information out there, it's hard to know what to work on first.

Really do appreciate the advice, no point in me playing if I am not improving and these forums seem to be a good means of making some improvement.

I don't know if micro-limit play is similar to freerolls or play money games, but in some really really low level games, as in worse than fish or equal to fish in 90% cases, I tend to get put on tilt very often with the bizarre play.

Like others have said, when you are playing in the micro stakes, there will be crazy people doing very stupid stuff. But that doesn't mean that straight forward, tight abc poker won't dominate at these levels, because it will. You said you have only been playing for three weeks, how many hands have you played in that amount of time, if you don't know exactly then you should definitely go get poker tracker or HEM. You may just have too small of a sample size, and may actually be doing everything right but still be down. I would highly recommend hanging around at the low levels and slowly grind up a good enough bankroll for the next levels. If you don't know the rights amount of buyins for the next level, just do a quick search for bankroll management and you can get all the info you'll need on that. Grinding your way up is a good way to know that you have learned a good amount from the level you are at and are PROBABLY ready to move on. Once you get a good amount of hands played, re-evaluate your game and see if you have any huge leaks still in your game (you will) and make sure you spend that time reading everything you can get your hands on, posting here on cardschat, watching some poker vids, and reviewing yours/others hands. I hope that helps you a little bit in your decision

"tight abc poker" - sorry, what is abc poker?

I have played about 2800 hands in that time (table games) and another 1700 in Tournaments (largely freerolls to get some practice, managed to place in the money on 1 freeroll, but otherwise not done very well). I have downloaded Poker tracker to have a look at it, but that as well is something that is currently beyond me. I will need to put a lot of time into understanding how to read it. Are there any good resources for helping to interpret those results and identifying the leaks? I am sure I have so many right now that even if I could read through all the data accurately, I would probably still have trouble identifying the biggest ones.

What is a good amount of hands to do a real evaluation? Is there a way of only evaluating the last n hands? I ask this because if I am going to evaluate my play every 10,000 hands, I don't want to have the previous 10,000 dirtying the data.

Any advice on how to start evaluating the data would be greatly appreciated, or the top n things to look at. I realise that is a very broad question, so any sort of advice to get me started will be fine, I don't mind doing the work myself and some searches, but hearing from people that have been there before can help me to stay on the right path.

You want 30k bare minimum. Even 100k doesn't really get past variance for sure, but you can't just play forever just to do so either. 40-50k should be enough to give an acceptably accurate representation of how you are doing.

Your standard deviation plays into how quickly you can accurately describe your play (from what I hear a 95% confidence interval is considered the norm). The info I have is from a heads up player, so their SD is higher than what a 6max player's would be. Generally SD runs from 40-60 PTBB for 6max players.

With a 75 BB/100 SD over 10,000 hands, (to have a 95% confidence level), your "true" winrate is +/- 14.7 BB/100 whatever your current winrate is.
If you're making 8 BB/100, then we can say with 95% certainty that your longterm winrate is somewhere between -6.7 BB/100 and 22.7 BB/100, with either number being equally likely.

Once you have 135,000 hands, a 95% confidence level is +/- 4 BB/100.
At this point if you still have that 8 BB/100 winrate, your "true " winrate is between 4 BB/100 and 12 BB/100.

This is how more hands affects the accuracy of your sample. You can extrapolate this information to whatever your current situation is, and see how many hands you feel are necessary to have an idea of how you're playing.

fergy05 said:

"tight abc poker" - sorry, what is abc poker?

I have played about 2800 hands in that time (table games) and another 1700 in Tournaments (largely freerolls to get some practice, managed to place in the money on 1 freeroll, but otherwise not done very well). I have downloaded Poker tracker to have a look at it, but that as well is something that is currently beyond me. I will need to put a lot of time into understanding how to read it. Are there any good resources for helping to interpret those results and identifying the leaks? I am sure I have so many right now that even if I could read through all the data accurately, I would probably still have trouble identifying the biggest ones.

What is a good amount of hands to do a real evaluation? Is there a way of only evaluating the last n hands? I ask this because if I am going to evaluate my play every 10,000 hands, I don't want to have the previous 10,000 dirtying the data.

Any advice on how to start evaluating the data would be greatly appreciated, or the top n things to look at. I realise that is a very broad question, so any sort of advice to get me started will be fine, I don't mind doing the work myself and some searches, but hearing from people that have been there before can help me to stay on the right path.

Click to expand...

ABC poker is the kind of poker you use against beginners. No refined semibluffs or anything sophisticated, that you might have to use at higher levels.
10k hands is a good ground for an evaluation IMO, anything less than that can be difficult to analyse.
Post hands, and statistics in the forum for discussion, think, read, keep your eyes open and head in place. Then you will learn a lot in no time.