Carl "The Dean" Sampson - Maximising profits in small-stakes NLHE

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Maximising profits in small-stakes NLHE

[ Posted June 24th, 2009 ] by contract

I very often get asked about how much profit a player can make in NL50 full-ring games. There is a reason that I get asked this question a lot and it is to do with the fact that I have been playing an awful lot of NL50 over the past few months. As always there is a motive behind my apparent madness and I have been working on my low variance system that I have dubbed The Vulture.

But the point of this article isn’t to talk about how well I am doing in these games (about $25/hour since I finalised the system) but to discuss ways of expanding the earn rate without having to move up a level. I have always believed that the overwhelming majority of poker players (myself included) are guilty of not fully maximising profits at their current level before the decision is made to move up.

I think that players are a little too eager to want to move up a level these days but moving up a level isn’t always conducive to making more money even if you are a very good player. The no-limit games on Cake Poker are quite easy to beat at the low levels but I think that most players become complacent when they start to make money…..I know that I do.

The same principle applies with regards failing to extract the proper value from a given pot. Players who should know better make silly plays all the time and maintaining concentration and focus all the time is something that is very difficult to do for most people. Is winning a $100 pot a good result? Is winning $400 for the session a good result? Is having an earn rate over 100k hands of $30/hour a good performance?

The answer to these three questions is “not necessarily”. What if by table selecting better or by focusing harder (which essentially means working harder) you could have won a $130 pot instead of a $100 one. What if that $400 winning session could have been a $500 one? What if that $30/hour earn rate could be $50/hour just by concentrating and working harder to concentrate on maybe playing an extra table or two?

So you can see here that our “successful player” has an awful lot of scope to expand the level that he is already playing at without having to move up. But yet most players who were making $30/hour over a large sample size would probably say that moving up a level would be the best way to make more money. This isn’t necessarily the case as there will nearly always be tremendous scope to improve within your own particular level of operation.

A student of mine sent me a large chunk of data from his Poker Office software (he has Poker Office because it is the one sniffer that I truly recommend to novice players) and the first thing that I noticed was that he was missing out on value by checking when he could have been betting.

This wasn’t just brought about by a faulty technical game but by playing too many tables at once. He was overloading himself simply because he was trying to play for rakeback. What we discovered was that playing more tables wasn’t making him more money simply because his extra rakeback payments were more than being offset by all of the value that he was losing. This just goes to prove that getting the most rakeback isn’t always the best way forward and exploring areas like table and seat selection and trying to improve our own individual concentration levels may just be the best way forward.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson can be seen at www.pokersharkpool.com