Rinse and Repeat

I went on a little heater playing live fixed limit 4/8 at the end of last month.  I decided to use the little bump in my bankroll and take a crack at 8/16.  The last three weeks have been pretty terrible.  I had one good session walking away 3 buyin's up and another modest positive session, the rest (about six in all) I had my ass handed to me.

A lot of what went wrong was just a normal end to running good; my old friend variance.  I can point to a lot of situations were I raised preflop, missed and either gave up or got called down.  There were also just some plain old coolers and a lot of missed draws.  I have to say I didn't learn anything new from my little adventure but a lot of stuff was confirmed.

One of the things that facilitated my winning streak is that I got some coaching that helped me think differently about my game.  I had fallen into a lot of weak-tight habits and was missing a lot of value.  Moving up to 8/16 with the higher proportion of decent players there, I saw (and felt) the effects of true tight-aggressive play that is absolutely essential in small stakes fixed limit.  My coach hammered home with me the fact that the bets in fixed limit are so small relative to the size of the pot that in most cases it's just correct to just keep betting and raising.

I intellectually knew this aggressive, thin value style of play was correct but still resisted, letting my anxiety of losing big pots get the best of me.  Sure enough, the better players I sat down with in the bigger game lost A LOT of pots.  BUT, the pots they won were bigger than they would have won if they took more passive lines AND they got some fold equity a few times.  The net results were decent sized stacks by the end of the night more often then not.

It's quite a different thing to read and learn about a strategy, it's quite another to watch it unfold in front of you and beat you into submission.  I'm heading back to 4/8 with my lessons a little more crystalized in my mind.  Hopefully, I'll be able to pad my bankroll at least as fast (or a little faster) than last time and take another crack at moving up.