Thoughts on PLO8 and NLHE

I spent of lot of time thinking to myself yesterday about the subjects of PLO8 and NLHE. The nuances between the games, the players themselves and generally my feelings towards the two disciplines.

PLO8 will always be my main game. Even if I put most of my volume in NLHE, like I am at the moment, I will always come back to it. It was the first game that I truly took seriously and made me want to learn and get better. NLHE was fun, but it never gave me the drive to spend hours trolling forums and read books, it was just a passing fancy. In fact, I probably wouldn't be where I am today, which granted isn't very much, but it's better than reloading Pokerstars with $10 every time a student loan payment came in. But when you grind it day in and day out for months at the time, the motivation just goes, and you find yourself yearning for something different, something just to spice up the routine. NLHE SnGs gave me just that and really just reignited that spark that poker just gives me in general.

But then the downswing came, and I found myself once again wondering if this was now the game I wanted to focus my attention on. I was discussing earlier with a fellow grinder the demoralization I felt when I discovered that in 2 months of grinding hard at these SnGs, I was still a loser, not by a huge amount but the fact that I was not even a break even player after such a period of top coaching was devastating. Sure I can chalk it up to variance, and many will say that even a 1k game sample is not enough to determine how good of a player someone is, but am I just not good enough for these. Other players in the stable have, in the same time period, blasted through the 2/180s and are cutting their teeth on the 12/180s, and making good money might I add. So I think to myself, how can these guys do it so easily and I'm struggling to even show profit? I thought about quitting on more than one occasion but wouldn't that be the easy way out, the cowardly option. I'll keep working, I'll keep trolling the forums, I'll keep going over the hand histories and hopefully, in the near future, all the effort and graft will pay off. We will see.

Well that's enough of me ranting for one day. With a bit of luck maybe I'll post you a sick sharkscope graph of me winning almost 1k this week =]

Till next time x