I am quietly working on my worst month in a year.  I'm up just a few thousand 60% thru the month.  Thank god for rakeback.  I did enough grinding the past two days to get back into the top 15 of my rake race.  Like I always say... what I lack in quality, I make up for in quantity.  Or was that something Mrs. Fly said to me the other day?

I'm obviously just joking.  Obviously.

To be fair, I did spend some time working on some things and experimenting at Rush and I'm starting to play a new game (6max).  So I can't be completely disappointed.  I'll post my thoughts about 6max later in the month.  I only have 16K hands, so I don't have a good feel yet.  What I will say is that the play is right in between full ring (where more often than not you give people credit for having a hand) and heads-up (where more often than not you don't give people credit for having a hand).

POKER

There are two ways to make a lot of money in online poker. You can play tons of tables at mid stakes or play fewer tables at high stakes. I've obviously decided on the former.  The main reason is because I suck sufficiently enough that I don't belong in high stakes. But even if I was better, I'm not sure if I would want to play a ton at 20/40+. I feel comforted by the law of large numbers. Poker can be a volatile game. My win rate is 2.5ptbb, but my standard deviation is 30-45ptbb. Think about that for a sec. That means at a 2/4 table, I can expect to make $20 per 100 hands. And 66% of the time, I'll be within -$300 and +$340 per 100 hands (assuming a std dev of 40ptbb).  Compare the $20 gain vs the $320 swing.  It also means that 17% of the time, I'll have a loss greater than $300 over ONLY 100 hands.

This is an extreme example, but if I wanted to make $200, my options could be play 10 tables of 2/4, 1 table of 20/40 (assuming my win rate is the same, which it wouldn't be), or something in between.  Ten tables of 2/4 gets me an average of $200, and a std dev of $1,000.  One table of 20/40 gets me an average of $200, and a std dev of $3,200.  Four tables of 5/10 gets an average of $200, and a std dev of $1,600.  That's why my focus for the next year or two will be on the games 5/10 and under.

Another reason is because at high stakes, you have more opportunities for cheating.  Recently, some high profile players have been accused of creating multiple accounts and softplaying (and possibly worse) with their friends at the same table.  You can cheat at any game, but the effect that cheating will have on my bottom line when I play 100K hands at mid stakes is much less than when I only play 10K hands at high stakes.