Mike Caro

As the title would suggest I am a $10-$20 Hold 'Em player, win more than I lose, but not too much, still learning.  I can do well in smaller limit games as well.

This past weekend I went to AC for the first time in a long while.  I stayed at the Trop.  When last I was there the Trop had a bustling poker room, offering a large variety of games from $1-$3 7-card stud to the pink hold 'em game, $7.50-$15, and a good many higher limit games.  When I went this time around there were three types of games: $1-2 nl, $2-$5 nl, and $2-$4-$6 limit.

I like to play where I'm staying so I spent some time at the $1-$2 nl game.  Twice in three hours I had premium cards and gave away my stack, about $200, to drawing hands.  Now I can appreciate the fact that $2 is a tiny little amount that many many people are more than happy to toss away for a look at the flop, but I've never seen looser players in my life, not even in a $2-$4 limit game.  A preflop raise had to be more than $15 to scare any cold caller, and even then it was only a few people that would fold.  And Anyone who already had money in the pot was going to call.  Nearly every hand saw five to six people to the flop, and it wasn't out of the ordinary to see nine!

I couldn't make the transition, mentally.  I was having trouble figuring out how to bet appropriately.  I could analyze my play after a hand and see mistakes I was making, and then correct them, but I was having a hard time, nevertheless, adjusting.  I just couldn't get my head around the way these people would toss away money on wild draws.  And I have never seen so many flushes and straights…

Not sure if it was the game, the setting, or the people, I went to the Borgata and jumped into the same game.  And got similar results.

It was bugging me that I was having trouble adjusting so I played it all weekend.  I improved slightly as the weekend wore on, getting used to the betting patterns, but I'm still at a loss.  Is this game beatable?  Tameable?  Anyone have similar issues switching over?

Oh, and there is always someone at the table with stacks and stacks of chips.  It's a $1-$2 game and every table I sat at had someone with $1000 in front of them, give or take, and I didn't see any of them doing anything too different than the other players.  Are they just really lucky?  What are they doing that I'm not?  Is this a basic strategy issue I need to work on?

Any thoughts would be welcome, thank you.

Thanks for the response, Mike Surel.  Patience is not a problem for me.  Neither is laying down big cards.  In the weekend I described, I played maybe thirty hands to a flop, over four days of moderate play time.  I played to a showdown maybe eight times, three of those resulting in losing my stack, two that I won relatively small pots, one large pot won, and two small pots lost.  I just couldn't get any decent cards to play, and I'm sitting there watching 2-3s, and 8-5o and kx, and j-7 take pot after pot after pot while I toss in $2 every third round (other than the blinds). (ps. I raised before the flop once to $15 UTG and every person at the table called! My A-K missed, 4-8s took it down, runner runner straight.)

Idk, maybe I'm not cut out to ride those swings.  That's entirely possible.  Maybe I should stick to limit.  it just bugs me that I can't "see" the game.

I'll take ur advice next time (2 weeks) I'm there and see what happens.  Thanks!