The Micro Stakes and The Freeroller

I was on pokerstars, trying to freeroll up some kind of bankroll. At first, it was damned near impossible - anybody who's ever played in a freeroll on pokerstars knows how the tournaments tend to have 8000 people vying for 27 spots in a tournament that actually has cash prizes, where you fight with another 2000 people. It's not worth it whatsoever.

Luckily, a friend of mine had an account with some money, and he tossed me $3. This was two days ago. I've had success on other sites with the whole freerolling thing, along with playing a pretty good amount in real life at random games with people I know, so this wasn't the first time I'd played with real money. Just my first chance at pokerstars. The first thing I did was hit the omaha hi/lo .01/.02 table, and then a hold 'em table, and pull myself up to $6ish.

A few things I've noticed about the micro stakes internet tables:

-Your bluff is worth nothing.

Well, this isn't entirely true. You can bluff, and you can sometimes pull it off if you deem your table tight enough, but it's not worth it. The amount of times people fold will not make up for the amount of times that they call. Don't bother.

-You encounter some strange situations.

One table I was at had a guy who went all in every hand. I've seen this in freerolls, but at a normal table? He made some ridiculous beats to get up to around $6 from his first dollar, then me and one other guy who hung around at the table when everybody else'd left proceed to wait for the right hands and call him until he lost all of his money.

-It's really hard to avoid thinking 'well, I'm down $2/up $1/whatever'

In real life, those chips in front of you don't count themselves down to the exact cent after every hand. It's easy to avoid thinking about whether you've made or lost money so far, which is a good thing - because, unless you're losing hundreds of dollars and need to stop playing before you lose more, you don't want to be thinking about if you're down or up. Otherwise, you start to feel like you don't want to leave until you've gotten back that $10 you lost... And that never leads to strong play.

Online, you always know exactly how much you have. You can't avoid it, it's right there next to the cards you're playing. And it's really easy to fall into the trap of 'well, maybe I'll fold rather than fall into a loss for the session..'. Obviously, that sort of thinking needs to be squashed for any serious success.

-There's a lot of profit to be had by being selective about which tables you play at.

Online, there are so many different options of where to play, and it's so easy to watch them for a little and see which table you want to select. You shouldn't ignore that advantage. If you observe a table for a bit and see some solid play, find a different one. There are always, at least at the stakes I've been at so far, weak tables that are just waiting to be cleaned up. Finding those tables makes the job of actually playing the cards much easier.

My current bankroll on pokerstars is $6.70. Let's see if I can get this thing to grow into something worth playing with.