Fear and Loathing at the Micros

This month I took a shot at 5NL. It went badly. Really badly. I have been trying to figure out exactly why this might be? Did I run under ev? Was I card dead? Are 5NL players better than me? Before I had posted a recent blog I thought perhaps it was the players are indeed better than me atm. But after a couple of DC members told me that the players really are not the different, I wondered otherwise. This is my graph for 5NL for March:

That is pretty gross.  That is $70! Or 14 buy ins!! You can see that is over a reasonable sample size of 14K hands. So it was not a mad tilting session - lol! 

So what did go wrong at 5NL? If the players are not that different how come I lost so much? Well at the moment the conclusion I am drawing to is that - the 5NL players are actually worse than 2NL players. Maybe. There are certainly a lot more aggressive. On one street particularly, the turn. However what I have found is that the 5NL player will play 2 pair + on the turn properly. They know how to value bet. What they also are willing to do is gamble more. This is where it makes them worse than 2NL players. But of course we need to be able to extract value from these players when they are willing to gamble, perhaps I need to learn how to do this. Watching betting patterns more closely should help this.

So again I think it is just a case adjusting to the players of the new limit rather adjusting your game too much. This my 2NL graph for March, playing the same way as I did at 5NL:

10K hands at 2NL and nice profit. So lets see if I can find a middle ground. We are @ 77.5 BI's for 2NL