Limit Challenge update and Fish Revisited

I've been neglecting the old blog, but I have been playing. I have finally made it back out of 0.25/0.50 limit hell and am back up to .50/1 limit. The play once you get to the .50/1, at least at Pokerstars, starts to become more rockish. At .25/.50 I would have no trouble finding several tables with open seats with 35% of the players (or more) seeing the flop. At .50/1 these tables are more difficult to come by. Most have 25-30% of players seeing the flop. I'm still around 21% VP$IP, so I am okay, but the edge is getting to be less. I am going to have to start tightening my hand selection as I move up from here. I currently have taken my 1.20 up to 36.72, so I am still quite a bit away from the next 1/2 level, where I will need to sit with 60.

I'd also like to revisit a post that I made in March around fish at the table. I had a discussion with someone the other day about playing at Party Poker. The person was talking about how they can't ever seem to make money there, and couldn't figure out why as the place is, quite obviously, full of fishy players.

I didn't really discuss it too much in the other post. Here's a quote "It's pretty tough to get to a point where this becomes -EV for you against random hands. So overall, more fish should be better for you. Sure, you will see big swings in your BR, but overall you should be a winning player."

Not that I said "overall". That's where this discussion moved to the other day. I think that my problem with Party, as well as the person that I was talking with, was that we don't have a very large statistical base to work with. I personally played for a pretty short time over at Party with real money, because the swings were so large. I would plunk down $50 or $100, sit at the $25 NLHE games and get frustrated. Why? Variance.

Fish at the table are great for your BR, long term. But only if you have the BR to cover the larger variance having those fish will cause. If you can deal with the short term, losses, having a "fishy" table is the way to go. If you can't, then you need to try to find a table with less fish, or learn to play limit poker, like I did.

I have heard some pros say that their BR variance is much higher in Limit than NL, but I haven't had this experience, yet. The difference may be that in High Limit games, there are less fish than in high NL games. If I ever make it to the higher limits, I'll let you all know.

Meanwhile, I'll cya at the tables.