I hope you guys will help me analyse what exactly went wrong in this horrible, horrible stretch. I'd like to start of with some general comments but intend to go through every hand here until I feel like I actually understand what was happening.

One obvious thing at the start: After the posted Darwinism hand, I was definitely tilting in terms of bankroll management. Also a barometer for me is whether I'm playing a good chess game, which kind of indicates whether my mind is working well or not. Well, I was losing a lot of chess matches online to players with ratings who should have been no match at all. So, I think I was playing kind of half brain-dead rather than with full skill level--again obviously not good. I don't know how I let myself do this, as I've never ever done that before, regardless of bad beats (although I do get pretty aggressive in terms of moving up if I'm confident I can beat a game--usually just not irrationally so, but I'm much too stubborn in terms of not quitting in a timely manner).

Anyhow, as I go through various hands, I'll probably leave out the ones where I'm just completely clear that I was doing something completely idiotic.

Here's my sense of the difference between the PLO200 and the PLO400 on Stars: There are a lot more raised pots at the $400 and a lot more aggressive play. BUT (and this is a difference I want to verify or falsiify in looking at it hand for hand) if you have comparable pot-sizes at a PLO400 table, it's much more often a 3-way pot rather than a 4- or 5-way. Then those players in the hand are just a lot more aggressive and less inclined to give you free cards. But my impression may also have to do with the completely subjective aspect that for me, at the 400 level, the blinds just seem to me to have significantly more meaning. I don't worry nearly as much about bleeding away $2 as I do about bleeding away $4. Anyhow, it feels like the $400 game tends to play noticeably more short-handed and noticeably more aggressively (presumably with the exception of tight tables which I avoided but might have been just the thing that my playing style in this bid was actually suited for).

Ok, now some raw data: My VPIP was at 34%, which is probably actually low by Reuben's standards, but really rather high in comparison to what I was successfully playing at the 200 (a little less than 25% overall, being a lot looser with position--like 35% or so in LP but more like 16% UTG). Anyhow, I'm not sure that some of these Reuben hands (like, say, deuces with AXs in a different suit than your deuces) are really all that desirable to play (at least for me currently) if you're in MP and can pretty much expect a raised pot with 2 opponents in. I also got less picky about hands like 5679, i.e., top-gappers (more on some of these in hand analyses).

My PF raise % was at 4.78%, which I consider pretty healthy.
Total aggression factor at 2.40, which doesn't seem to me like overdoing it from what I've gathered.

Summary for me, then:
VPIP: 34%
PF raise: 4.78%
Agg: 2.40

And for comparison with a clear expert, namely Darwinism, I have the following (no doubt with some degree of deviation due to not huge numbers, but based on 276 hands (which usually is fairly close):
VPIP: 26.5%
PF raise: 14%
Agg: 4.00

So, he was playing significantly tighter but more aggressively. This doesn't actually surprize me terribly, as my feel for him was that if he bet the flop, he was almost never going away, USUALLY 3-betting to a raise. However, one other noticeable feature: He had a lot more fold equity going than my humble self. Everyone knows who he is and is obviously a bit scared, hence some of the things I've been thinking about regarding shifting gears. Maybe that level of aggression (which is apparently higher than mine was although I felt like I was playing aggressive as all get out) has to be earned by getting a very tight reputation first (that also corresponds to my feel in the successful phase of the 1/2).

What I also wonder is whether I bear down and play pretty tight, then having established that, get to be successful playing more aggressively but don't know when to shift back down or try to apply it in a game where I have no image at all yet (as initially in the PLO400).

What I also noticed about Darwinism: He was raising (typically to 3 BB rather than max on most raises) a lot of pretty good JJ-KK hands, and even slightly dodgy TT (like TT87) but I don't think I once saw him lay those things down to a re-raise, even if it was as much as one third to one half of available stack-depth (also an issue on which I'd like to double-check my impression). I honestly don't see how one can make that work.

As I figure it, you're going to have to either set (1/8 of the time) or have a straight draw (maybe 1/6 at most) to proceed. Ok, so you stack the guy a lot of the time if you set and he stacks you more often than not if you're nothing more than open-ended (particularly if he has the flush draw), but I don't understand how this can really work in the long-run.

Anyhow, he's raising a lot of hands to make it to 14%, and his aggression factor is pretty consistently around 4 on all of the later streets. Mine was highest on the flop (2.49), going down to 2.23 or 2.20 on turn and river.

So, that means one of two things: Either
1) you need to have more of an established image to play at that aggression level or
2) I was picking the wrong spots for playing aggressively.

If it's 2), then I actually wasn't playing aggressively enough but was picking my spots poorly.

Ok, so much for a start. Hopefully I'll get around to looking in detail at various portions of these sessions tomorrow and can start to post some.

While I won't be playing the $400 again for a while unfortunately, I'm DETERMINED to figure out how to beat it.

Any ideas so far are definitely appreciated!

I agree with you on most points, then there are a bunch of interesting questions for which I'll have to look at the data I have. A few comments in the meantime:

1) repping scare cards. I've had a lot of success with this ONCE I HAVE ESTABLISHED MYSELF AS TIGHT (and that over period usually of a good deal more than 1,000 hands in the particular game). I kept trying these plays that were working for me at the 200 (AFTER shifting back to tight) and had way less fold equity at the 2/4. I think it may also have been the reason why I didn't too so well at the start when I moved up to 1/2 from the .50/1. But I had sense enough to shift back down to tight for a while until I kind of slowly but surely would steal a little more often, then a little more, etc. Hence my shifting gears ideas. I think what happens to me is that I have a losing phase (which I'm capable of doing at the 1/2 already--that game just no longer feels truly easy), then go tight and it works. Then my LAG nature creeps in more and more (and also works because they already have their player notes on me as being very tight). Then I move up a level and there are a lot of unfamiliar faces, and I'm still in LAG mode without the kind of table image that allows it to work.

Really good example: Half-pot bet on the full. After I've been playing tight at the 1/2 for a while, I get folds like 90% of the time when I was only on a draw that had nothing to do with the paired board. With no table image, I almost think it's better just to check behind until you've got them convinced that you really are going to be full at least a pretty large percentage of the time. Anyhow, I remember that at the 2/4 that play was just not working very often, maybe just barely enough to become break-even, if that.

2) Darwinism and raises in position. I'll try to get some more info on that as I go through the hands. He was also checking a lot OOP, but that was more my impression from the first time I sat at a table with him. For whatever reasons, whether it be reads or just the way the cards were falling, it seemed like he was checking after raising more than he was in subsequent sessions. But I'll also try to get a handle on the positional component.

3) Darwinism and re-raises. Well, he'd make calls of re-raises in situations where there was absolutely no way that AA could possibly go away--like stack is $120 and the re-raise is to $50, and it's HU. I'm pretty sure that the hand I noted on that particularly one was where he had raised TT87 OOP. Well, in order to be in good shape, you've gotta have either a set (with no A showing, and which may not be a big favorite if AA has the flush draw) or some kind of 96 rainbow board or at the very minimum an open-ender with a little flush draw, maybe open-ender with just your overpair and no A. Ok, if those are the only flops where you can continue, you can continue very roughly 25% of the time. So, 3 times you lose $38 always, and the other times you'll usually win with your set, sometimes with the draw, although you're also underdog some of the time (I'm constructing this example a little bit because I can't remember exact stack-depths, but it seemed awfully dodgy to me calling the re-raise with some of the hands he called with).

4) Raising a lot more with position. I just don't think I'm down for raising AK72ds to the K and A at the moment. I really figured that my "objective" raising percentage should be a little over 5%, but the actual stat is probably adjusted due to the fact that I'm often calling raises with hands where I would have raised had it been limped to me. I'm still not excited about raising TT87 even with position, although I'm down for TT98 etc. Also a bunch of JJ-KK hands with straighting side-cards, possibly also (as real value raises still) JJ-KK with suited A (preferably the suited card being the other suit). I view JJ-KK with a non-suited A as a raising hand I like but also as more of a kind of bluff-raise that can hit (and also creating doubt about my setting with JJ-KK).

5) Raise quantities. Well, here the experts seem to disagree, too. Rolf and Darwinism seem to like the 3 BB you recommend. Reuben seems to like max-raising a lot. At the moment, I'm inclining rather more to the Reuben school on that one because it just seems to me like IF the given hand, including positional aspects, etc., is in principle profitable, you're just magnifying that profit-rate by the maximum amount--which has to be a good thing.

6) VPIP. I'm wondering whether even 25% is getting a bit on the high side at first in a tough game and with no image. If you do that, you're definitely playing hands like AKT2r for a limp OTB, and you're playing every JJ-KK to a raise, particularly if my impression is correct that at the 2/4 we're talking about a lot of raised 3-way pots. Anyhow, I'm beginning to become increasingly convinced that you really only want to play loose when they think you're playing tight--and probably conversely play tight when they think you're loose. The time for the latter is what I've definitely been missing.

I'll get some more details later, and thanks very much for your help so far!

I guess a large part of what I'm trying to say at the moment is pretty much summed up in your point: "to get a reputations as a player to be feared, you've got to show down big hands when the pots are big." However, this "playing marginal hands more aggressively" is the difficult part. I was definitely doing that big time, and unfortunately they just weren't hitting--something over which you have no control. But I was just doing it too much--nut flush draw on straight boards where I'm virtually certain I'm not dealing with a set (hence full 9 outs, but with only 1 card to go).

I am including in "playing tight" being very willing to raise with 13-outers or better, particularly on the flop. But 9-outers of whatever kind are getting a little too thin. I do think you almost have to bet and raise your 13-outers fairly routinely (with some exceptions) in order also to keep the straight bluff credible (similar to the half-pot boat bluff). But pursuing worse draws than that with a lot of aggression is getting into some dangerous terrain.

One thing I wanted to check and point out about the aggression factors:

That stat is simply (bet% + raise%)/(call%). So, you can actually check-fold all but 1 hand out of 1,000 (which you play for all its worth) and still have an aggression factor of infinity (since you called 0% of the time).

What it DOES mean here is that for every time Darwinism calls, he bets or raises 4 times. For every time that I call, I bet or raise only 2.5 times.

For a high aggression factor (which does seem to me a good thing), one MIGHT actually suggest the following: A call just means top 2, probably with something like open-ender. But on draws, if they're worth playing at all, they're more often worth raising.

I'm guessing that at least during my failed, badly executed LAG attempt at cracking this game, Darwinism was doing more folding than I was on the marginal draws, just forgetting perhaps about anything less than roughly a 12-outer (what I've also noticed is that these "x-outer" statements can be a little deceiving, as there's a big difference between the way certain types of draws play against others, and against sets, and that's not entirely just reducible to "more outs = better draw"... so, now in the future, when I say 12-outer in a more general context, I don't necessarily mean that you have to have a full 12 nor that you even have to proceed always with what looks like a 12-outer--just to set the record straigth on that one).

More Darwin data:

First action on flop after a PF raise:

Bet: 46.15%.
Call: 5.13% (i.e., almost never--is this AA with nothing maybe?)
Check: 20.15%
Fold: 5.13%
No flop: 23.08%

So, in actuality, he was betting/raising roughly 2/3 of the time he saw a flop. That's a LOT, I think.

Comparing to me at the 2/4:

Bet: 45.71%
Call: 2.86% (wow, even less for me)
Check: 25.71%
Check-raise: 2.86% (Darwin did that once over ALL pots played, for a percentage of 0.65%)
Fold: 0% (that's probably the real crux of the difference for me)
No flop: 22.86%

Interesting. These stats don't look all that different to me from Darwinism's. Rather disconcerting is the 0% fold for me (which can't be good). But I really wasn't over-agg on CBs, apparently. I was raising tighter than he does but actually made a CB slightly less often.

I think the roughly 2/1 ratio between bets and checks is pretty healthy for raising hands. I would also guess that Darwinism almost never check-called. If he checked, he was almost always going to fold.

But even the 2/1 may depend a lot on table image (i.e., needs to be lower until you have the image to back it up).

also, i don't know what reuben book you're referring to, but the NLPL poker book just seemed to be talking about different games than i've seen online. i don't really know, though.

Yeah, I'm starting to see where you're coming from here.

I hope we can continue this discussion in some extended hand analysis threads. What I'm planning on doing first is doing this manual compilation of some of the data, which is pretty tedious and may take a week or more since I'm doing it just a little bit at a time.

Then I'd like to come back and thoroughly analyse some sequences of hands, including just simple PF folds, doubtful folds, calls or raises subsequently, and stuff like that, as well as looking in greater detail at almost 300 Darwin hands. Actually, it's looking like you're right in terms of the positional component of his raises. He does raise some in MP, but it's usually like MP3 after a few limpers on the hands I've looked at so far. But I'm still going to keep an eye out for any EP raises and what hands we're talking about.

I guess one other thing with regard to your last post: If you're not planning on really proceeding without a set, top 2 or a 13-outer, then you really need 4 cards working together. Non-wrappy hands are really a waste of money if that's going to be your flop plan. If the game is such that betting top pair with not much more than just a strong kicker in a raised 3-way pot is profitable, then you can loosen up your raising criteria.

My current opinion is actually that some switching between those styles at the right times is at least one approach capable of cracking the bigger games.