New tactics

I decided to modify my playing style a bit at the weekend as mentioned in my posdting here. I had considered myself pretty tight and agressive but I did seem to keep losing out by playing the odd bad hand. It seemed to be happening on or around the bubble or if I'd limped in on the big blind and hit something mediocre against fellow limpers.

With a little advice from a friend I decided it was time to try a few things. I know some of the poker books advise that you should change just one thing at a time so you can monitor the results more accurately, hmm, I guess I neglected to heed that piece of advice.

1) I should start playing even more tight/agressive. Therefore a narrower range of starting hands and getting even more aggressive when short stacked to steal blinds wherever possible.

2) My patience in tournaments is pretty good but my discipline seemed to be letting me down. I could play well for an hour and not make what I thought was a bad decision and then one moment of madness and I've blown it. So in my new regime I needed to try and be a lot more disciplined, we'll see how that works out.

3) There's something that had been bugging me for a while. I consider myself to be a reasonable player, certainly considering that I've not been playing very long, however many of my friends seemed to be doing rather better than me online. I've been consuming as many books as possible and am pretty comfortable with a lot of the theory but my results weren't as good as I thought they ought to be. I guess that's true of a lot of players but it was starting to bug me. I had wondered for a while if my I should try dipping my toe in the water at a higher level because I feared that perhaps my opponents at $2 & $5 Sit and Go tournaments weren't paying enough attention to the play to understand my moves. So I decided it was time to tentatively dip my toe in some $10.00 Sit & Go's

Only time will tell if these changes improve my ROI and ITM (In The Money) ratio but the early results are looking promising. The sample set is still tiny and it's way too early to make a call but the early signs are encouraging. I've now played five $10.00 Sit & Gos and finished in the money three times (2nd, 2nd, 3rd). Buyins $55, Winnings $80. That's an ITM of 60% and an ROI of 45%. I'll keep plugging away at these and record my results here.

Wish me luck...