Taming down your game

[MXRider]

Nick, as a fairly new NL player and working from the bottom levels and hoping to proceed upwards, I am finding myself over my first 20k hands or so at $25NL to beinvolved in way too many very large pots. When looking at my overall graphs, I feel that I am looking at a mountain range with the huge peaks and valley's. I am overall, at least so far, beating the level but could be doing much much better if I could find myself not paying off bigger hands as much. I'm sure that any adjustments I make will also affect the peaks that I have, but I'm really not sure where to begin. I have recently posted a bunch of "Big Pot" hands in the NL section for review of my peers as I try and get ahold of this if you want some particular examples.

TIA

[NickChristenson]

First, I haven't seen your data, but if you're winning overall, I'm not immediately sure you're playing too many big pots. You might be, but perhaps your results speak for themselves.

Playing poker, especially big bet poker, there are going to be big peaks and valleys in your results. I don't know if yours are especially large, but overall it's probably just something you have to come to terms with if you want to play no-limit.

Not paying off hands is tough. You need to call on the end some times or people will run over you. So, if you call on end with only your best hands, you'll save some money, but you can expect folks to start bluffing you more, these will be more effective, and you'll likely lose back some of the money you're saving. So it's sort of a "two steps forward, one step back" thing.

If you know you're paying off too much, I would think that you would be able to make the appropriate change in your game. I think the hard part would be coming to this realization. If your numbers show that you're, say, making one bad call per hour of play, on average, then focus on setting a goal of making a strong laydown a little less frequently than that.

One thing that I'd suggest is to go through your hand history and mark the big hands you play where there's a showdown. Then on each betting round I'd evaluate my equity in the pot at that point against the money that's ends up going in on future rounds and decide if I'm actually getting the right odds to continue at each point. From this sort of analysis you can decide if you're typically getting the right price when you play these big hands (and if so, there's no reason to change anything), and if not it should help to reinforce in your mind that you're doing something wrong, plus this analysis should make it clear as to what kinds of hands or situations are causing you trouble.

If all else fails, you can try to play by a couple of rules of thumb. One is that if you get raised on the turn or river, to always fold one pair hands. I wouldn't recommend this as an "always" strategy, but if you're specifically looking to play fewer big pots, this might be something to try for a while and see what happens.

[Zool1]

Thought I'd bump this to suggest PokerEV for exactly this purpose (analysing your equity in hands that get to showdown). It will automagically analyze your equity on each street (on individual hands or across your entire DB) and show you a nice histogram of equity vs money put in on all 4 streets. The goal being to get the two bars to be roughly the same height - discrepancies either way would indicate that you're not value betting enough (EV > money in) or that you're paying off and/or bluffing too much (money in > EV).

[NickChristenson]