Testing the $1/$2 Waters.

Since I suck at $0.50/$1 so much I figured maybe it was time to move up in limits. The fact that I average one winning session out of four at the lower level is obviously due the crappieness of my opponents and has nothing to do with my mad poker skills.

My wife was going out with some of her friends this evening, so my plan was try out a $1/$2 ring game for an hour or so, and then see if there were any multi table tournaments that looked interesting.

Unfortunately the Cubs were playing the Yankees, so I opted to watch a few innings of the game first to make sure I was good and tilty before I started playing poker. There were a couple $5 MTTs starting up on PokerRoom within 20 or 30 minutes of one another, so I decided that I would try those, and if I did well/lasted a while, then that would be it for the night, if I busted out early then I’d give $1/$2 a try.

A little over an hour later and I’m pulling up my first $1/$2 table in quite a while. I had dabbled once or twice before when trying to clear a bonus, but this was the first time that I was really going to play at this level.

I limited my play to about an hour. I just wanted to test it out to see how comfortable I was at these stakes. By limiting the time I was going to play I could make sure that if things went badly I would have a stop loss, and if they went well, I wouldn’t get over confident and bleed my profits away as I’m sometimes prone to do.

So anyway, I played for about an hour, which made for a total of 55 hands, and I finished up 21BB. Not too bad. I found that the difference between this level and the $0.50/$1 level was that here, I would hit hands, and there was always someone there to pay me off, where as in the lower level, I would hit hands and there was always someone there to suck out on me.

Seriously though, I got some pretty damn good cards. Out of the 55 hands that I played I had [AK] three times and [KK] three times. I didn’t get much action on my kings but at least they didn’t get cracked. AK only held up once, but I was able to get away from the hand relatively cheaply the other two times, and didn’t get married to my hand. One of the benefits of moving up a level is that I know it is going to be expensive to get to showdown, so end up playing more tightly and staying out of trouble. When someone obviously flopped trips against my big slick, I was able to get out rather than stubbornly calling his raises all the way to the river. It was funny because someone did stubbornly chase a hand where they runner runnered a straight to beat the other guys trip 8s.

In addition to being dealt great cards, I got a lot help from the board. My medium pocket pairs flopped trips a few times, and my top pair nut flush/straight draws hit more often than not. It also helped that my opponents were just morons. I had guys with bottom pair calling me all the way to the river after I had raised pre-flop, bet on every street and the board showed scare cards and a possible straight. I was shocked and relived to win those hands because I had put them on two pair, or trips, or maybe a made straight, only to see them turn over bottom pair. Unless they thought I was completely bluffing all the time, I don’t know what they were doing.

To make up for my much better than expected session, I’m sure that I won’t see a card higher than an 8 for the next few months, but so far, with this admittedly small sample size, I’d have to rate the experiment as a success.

We’ll see if I can keep it up.