The simple answer to this complex questions is: Yes.
I’ve found this out in the past few weeks. I’d been having a bit of a bad run, and I tightened up my game. It turned out to be to my detriment, and to the detriment of my bankroll.
I turned to Old Reliable: the Small Stakes Hold ‘Em book by Ed Miller, David Sklansky, and Mason Malmuth. In reading it for the 4th (or maybe even 5th) time, I found that indeed I was playing too tightly for a small stakes game. I found also that I wasn’t recognizing well enough situations where I had an edge, which meant that I was too passive in those situations.
I know that one weekend, 3 sessions totaling 18 hours, is just a small blip in the lifetime game, but the weekend results are, I think, promising. 18 hours of $6/$12, a net profit of $700, or nearly $40/hour (aka more than 3 big bets an hour), and that’s not counting the $100 4-of-a-kind bonus I also got lucky enough to hit.
The Sunday session, the longest of them all at more than 7 hours, was the most instructive and interesting. It was a new game at a table with a shuffling machine, which meant a good half dozen or so more hands an hour. Within just a few hands, I had identified three calling stations at the table, the most severe was 2 seats to my left, not the most ideal.
This particular calling station called nearly every hand preflop and went to the river nearly every time with the smallest piece of the flop. I took a couple of bad beats from him on big pots, the most memorable when I raised preflop with AQo, got several callers, the flop came A-10-x rainbow, and lost to him on the river, after the x card paired, when his 10-7 hand found a 3rd 10 on the river. And while it was frustrating to see him get that lucky–he actually had that luck several times and walked away a nice winner, although he was felted once and pulled out more money from his pocket–I knew that his strategy was not a long-term winner.
I actually was almost felted from my initial $300 buy-in, but I thought that the table overall was a good one for me and decided to kick in $100 more, a rare decision. But I wasn’t tired and I believed that I was making (mostly) good decisions, although to be fair there were a couple of hands where I thought I donkeyed off chips unnecessarily.
One of the lessons that SSHE teaches is that sometimes you can back into a hand. An example of this was a hand where I had Ax offsuit, but got to play it being in the blinds. The ace was a club, and 3 clubs hit on the flop, with only one a Broadway card. I pushed, hard, betting and raising, even when the turn missed, and on the river an ace hit. By then it was only one other player, who made a crying call having started with 10-6 and paired his 6 on the flop. The aggression I showed pushed out (eventually) others who may have backed into a hand, allowing me to back into the winner, even though the winner wasn’t the nut flush that I was drawing to.
Even when I missed–and of course I did miss–I felt confident that recognizing the places where I had an edge and pushing them when I saw them would make me a long-term winner. And over this short span, it did indeed work. That feeling also made the misses less devastating, and even the suckout less worrying.
Another interesting thing is that I also recognized the shift in the tenor of a table. Late Saturday, I was dealing for awhile with a dingle maniac, who raised preflop nearly every hand. It was helping my make money when I had the goods, and I had no problem folding when I didn’t. But later, another maniac sat down. I decided that I did not want to deal with two maniacs at the same table, that such a situation would likely affect my bottom line, and when the blinds came around again, even though I was way up and not particularly tired, I decided to get up and leave.
This is example of a good decision not about a specific poker hand, but about a more general poker situation. Decisions such as this one can make you more money that the decisions on several poker hands.