POTD #192 A Small Pot in a Nosebleed Cash Game

Not quite Rail Heaven, but something close.

Most of the poker I’ve played in my life has been in tournaments. I was drawn to tournaments because, like many people of my age, I got into poker from watching WSOP and WPT final tables on TV. I wanted to play the same format of poker as Daniel Negreanu, Phil Hellmuth, and Phil Ivey. Cash games seemed like something that Doyle Brunson played in back rooms, while tournaments crowned world champions like Chris Moneymaker. I, to put it mildly, did not consider myself to be a Doyle Brunson type and gravitated towards the form of poker that was designed for dweebs like me.

Winning trophies and competitions is nice. PocketFives had online leaderboards tracking the best online tournament players and there was no equivalent for cash games. However, the main reason I gravitated towards tournaments is because I lacked the discipline and soft skills to play cash games. Cash games, especially when I started playing online, never broke. There were always good mid-stakes games running, and I could not find a healthy medium between thinking “since the games are good, I should be playing every waking hour” and “these games will still be here in an hour; I can play another game of Madden.” I knew when tournaments started and registered them from the start, then I played until I ran out of chips. It was a simple schedule, with no decision fatigue about when I should start and when I should quit.

I continued to dabble in cash games to clear bonuses or scratch a poker itch if I only had a couple of hours to play, but soon I found another problem when I wanted to play cash games. If there was a seat available in a good game, I was unlikely to get it. All the seats went to players with the best seating scripts, or at least the players camped out at their computer waiting to sit the moment a VIP sat. My knowledge of the player pool was limited, so even if a VIP sat down, the seat was filled by the time I learned if this player was bad enough to warrant me joining the game. However, during COVID there was a notable exception, nosebleed games. If I saw a spot in a $500/$1k game, it was often possible to get a seat in a game. If a spot opens at $25/$50, there are tons of players with five figures in their account who could sit down. If a spot opens in a $500/$1k game, you’re competing with people who are awake and at their computer, have over six figures in their account, and are willing to play a game at these stakes or can quickly sell enough action that they’re comfortable with the risk they’re taking in the game. This allowed me to play in some very big games, with mixed results.

It’s a weird quirk of the poker ecosystem that the only way I could consistently get seats in soft cash games were when the stakes became so high that it froze other people out. I was happy to get seats in these games because I believed I was winning, but there were all sorts of skills that cash game professionals had developed that I had not. I did not know how to alter my preflop strategy to minimize the total amount of rake I paid. I did not always sense when the game was going to break and ended up playing a few too many big blinds for my liking. The nosebleed stakes meant I also had to balance some tournament-like future game considerations. At times I might have only had 2-3 buyins in my account, and I needed to balance maximizing my winrate with not busting my account and knocking myself out of action. In today’s hand, I had a pretty simple flop decision, when I out-thought myself and gave up more EV I should have. You can read about it below.

HH: GGPoker

($500/$1000/$2000$200) (SB/BB/STR/ANTE) 6 Handed

Mikita Badziakouski ($81,900) makes it 4k UTG, it folds to me in the BB ($99,800) with Q♠️5♠️ and I call.

Flop ($10,700) 4♣️4♠️2♥️: I check, Mikita bets $2638, I fold.