Best Rakeback Guarantee

I have been playing poker online for nearly three years. In that time I only had one losing month with rakeback and prop pay until December 2005. December 2005 and January 2006 have been my first ever back to back losing months. Luckily November was my best month ever as I won 2700 big bets.. We all know variance catches up with is in the end though. There is not a poker player in the world that can say otherwise. In the last two months I have lost about 900 big bets. Looking at the big picture it is just a bump in the road but to a serious poker player it was time to study my Pokertracker stats.

I took the laptop to a wireless hotspot with my Pokertracker database and studied my play. I am a serious Omaha High/Low and Stud High/Low player but in these games I was about even, it was my Holdem play that required review. I was only able to find a few holes in my play. Most of these holes were calling a big blind raise into multi way pots with a middle suited ace such as A7s. I would flop the ace and lose to a bigger kicker, never making a flush. These hands of course make flushes and win big multi way pots during hot runs, but not in this cold streak and many serious players would have the discipline to lay these hands down. Another hole I found was that I was calling raises at the button or cutoff with middle suited connectors such as 9Ts and TJs and not making a hand of any value. I did find that calling big blind defense hands such as 97s or 86s, what most would consider trash, made winning hands.

My aggression factor was in the same range as it had always been. I made the correct play on hands such as KQo, QJs, KJs, KQs and KTs or other hands many players would consider sucker hands. I either was the first in and raised or mucked these hands to position raises. I began to wonder where I was going wrong. Many of the hands I lost big pots to were hands where a huge underdog called my preflop raise and got lucky and hit two pair. It got to the point where even if I flopped a big set or the nuts I would try to figure out how I would lose and it would happen. Being a $5/$10 player I wasn't sure where to go from there.

The first thing I did was drop down to $3/$6. The rake in this game is not as player friendly but the player quality makes up for this. I still was unable to beat this game. I then dropped down to $2/$4. Suddenly I was at least breaking even to the many donks at this limit. This still did not give me much confidence. I decided to drop down to $1/$2 6max. I finally found a game I could once again beat. My confidence was coming back and I was finally a profitable poker player again. After 2000 hands I was winning 4 BB/100, not my usual winning pace in this limit but a great start. The players in $1/$2 6 max are terrible so even though I am not winning a substantial amount of money the confidence is coming back. The confidence is the first step to the right track of playing.