Has your game stalled?
Author: Jesse McLean
Summary: How to restart your game when it has stalled.
Do you feel like your game has hit a plateau? Like you’re just slogging along, not learning much, not earning much (and there’s a reason these two words are so simmilar), and generally not going anywhere?
Don’t worry, pretty much everyone stalls at some point. I’m going to share some ideas about how you can get round, over, or through whatever it is that is stopping you from improving / making money / having fun.
One of the main causes of stalling is boredom. If you’ve been hanging out at the same game, same limits (and often the same main site or two) for a while, everything starts to feel a bit same-old same-old. This used to happen a lot for me until I learned to play NL, but it still happens now. I try and go round this boredom blockages by switching things up.
A change is as good as a rest as they say. If you’re a Limit Holdem player, go play some No Limit (for the smallest stakes you can and play tight and straightforward untill you feel comfortable with the different strategies of the game). If you’re bored of holdem, go play some Omaha, or Stud (again, it helps to read up and have some sort of idea how to play). Maybe you feel like trying some high-low or low only games? Or perhaps playing a tournament would make poker fun again. There are a dozen ways of doing something different while still playing poker. Plus, it’s like cross-training for sports. Unless you do something stupid (like I did last night when I decided Ace was low in 2-7 triple draw – it isn’t), trying a different game will flex different poker muscles that will make you a better player overall.
Another way people try and work through plateaus in their motivation is by taking on some sort of quantity challenge. Basically the idea is to complete a certain number of hands / SNGs (often with a timeframe). I’ve seen people try things 24 SNGs in a day (multitabling), 10,000 hands a week, and so on. I even know of a winning 5/10 player who went down to 50c/$1 to play 100,000 hands (the idea was to log them all in poker tracker so he could really analyse his game). The bottom line is that having a goal to work towards can help you sit down and play hands, even when you’re just breaking even, or folding everything, or whatever.
Now the really fun kind of challenges are the bankroll challenges. This is where you try and turn $100 into $10,000 (or whatever) by starting at a low limit (even and especially if you usually play higher) and moving up at designated points (usually after winning a number of Big Bets). For example, I started with $200, and made it my goal to win 100BB at every level between 1-2 and 10/20. So when I had won $200, I moved up to 2/4, and so on, moving down when my bankroll dropped to the starting amount of the level before. This was great fun, and eventually I had about 2000 in neteller and a huge feeling of satisfaction. I have also done something similar with SNGs (I started with $110 and playing $10+1, and moved up whenever I had 10 buyins for the next level).
Some words of warning – don’t do this type of thing with your whole bankroll, especially if you can’t or don’t want to step down in limits.
The bottom line is that if you’re feeling bored, or that your game isn’t improving, or whatever, then you could do a lot worse than making up some sort of poker challenge and trying it.
