I'm a 50 yr old IT Mgr that discovered the wonders of online poker around 3 years ago. I've been trying to get my game to semipro level by reading books and have taken a few lessons from Al Spath. All my play has mainly been on the Party Network.

This is my 5/10 play Post Al. My last lesson was 2 months ago. The one thing that he said that hit home the hardest was.. "Why play when the odds are only 50/50?" He said that when I wanted to cold call a raise. This took my VoIP from 17 to 14.5.
My frustration is my last 2 weeks play (posted next). It seems like Party is real easy to beat the first half of the month then I get beat up the second half.
BTW This is the first intelligent poker site I have found since I started play. Thanks for starting it.

Last 21,000 hands



I have been working on protecting my blinds.

This is my last 2 weeks. Are swings like this normal?





I will value your input.

In limit hold'em, swings like the one you have are very normal. Playing live, and being as aggressive as I am when I play live, my swings can be monstrous in the same session. Anyway, to get an idea of where to be at, you probably want to check out the Limit aggression Stats topic stickied at the top of the limit hold'em page. And then wait a bit for someone with a better idea of numbers to help you out. I am not that person when it comes to limit PT numbers. Although personally, I think your aggression numbers could use some increases on every street. And you might be completing too much in the SB. And if you are folding your BB to a single raise heads up, stop it.

Not to bump an old thread, but I'm new here and thought maybe I could give a tiny bit of insight since you didn't get much responses.

Before I make a comment about PT stats, I will say that there is more than one way to play poker and while there are clearly "incorrect numbers" (i.e. a VPIP of 80% is clearly a loser), there is no "correct number" for each player. You should also never try to play to adjust your stats - i see people doing this - work on one part of your game like value betting and your number will naturally get better as you improve.

With that said, there are two things I think I can identify:
The first one is easy - your river AF is pretty low. You are a tight player with that VPIP and you rate to have better hands more often than a player with say a VPIP 25%. I can almost guarentee you are missing value bets on the river by checking so much.
This is a very difficult aspect of limit poker and I think one of the hardest to learn - I think about this constantly and still miss them.

The other issue is a bit more controversal - you are pretty damn tight. You have proved that you can be a winning player at this VPIP and maybe you are more comfortable, but you should experiment with opening up your game a little. A VPIP of 20% can sustain a very nice win rate as long as you play postflop well. I'm not saying you should strive for that VPIP, what I am suggesting is move down a level or so and experiment with opening up your game. You probably have your blinds stolen quite a bit and may want to defend a little more to keep the sharks at bay. Every 10K hands look at your WSD% - you are at 54% now - if you can open up and keep this above 50% you will be making a bigger bb/100 and more money overall but lose slightly more pots. My VPIP at 2-4 stars (maybe close to 5-10 party in skill level) is 20.5% but my WSD is stil 52%, for instance.

The flip side to this is that it is probably easy to multitable at this VPIP so if you just want to make money and not improve your game as much, there are many people that accept a lower win rate to be able to multitable, reduce their variance, and make money.
But if you ever play live with this VPIP people will very quiclky notice and you will get eaten alive, so if you planning on playing live you might want to "practice" opening up more online.

Just some thoughts, anyone beating 5/10 is a pretty good player, so don't take any of this personally.