One could probably employ some Game Theory, eg: Sklansky's Hold'Em For Advanced Players (Ch. 12?). Not easy, but it's a start.
Micro stakes Planet Poker has micro stakes games, and they probably have more varieties of poker than any other site. They even have "Lowball" Draw, which will mess with your mind! All the rules are opposite, pairs are bad, flushes and straights and full houses are worthless. This game will give good training for the "Hi-Lo" games. I think Omaha Hi-Lo can be a good game to play, because it gives you the chance to win two different hands with the same cards. The problem with Planet Poker's micro-stakes games is there's hardly ever anyone playing them. Freeroll tournaments Anyhow, from May 12 to May 18 Planet Poker will have a freeroll tournament every 6 hours: 5 am, 11 am, 5 pm, 11 pm, 6 days in a row. They're free, and the winner gets real cash. Referral bonus If you want to sign up for Planet Poker, there's a referral bonus if you sign up through referral. The person referring you gets $50 if you deposit $50 and play a certain amount of hands. When you sign up through the referral, you get 500 Player Points which are usable for player points tournaments and perhaps other things. If anyone wanted to sign up, if you sent me your e-mail I could get you the referral invitation (have to get that before you sign up). If you qualified for the $50 bonus, I would split that with you.
After rereading the Carson book I'm now doing reasonably well and have steadily tripled my meagre account size without any major drawdowns. Anyway, on my virtual (Oanda) FX trading account I've managed a 6% gain in the past week with a 1% risk per trade. Is this considered good/sensible? And other than the psychological issues are there any other (non obvious) differences between virtual trading and the real thing? Thanks, TheStatsMonkey
I stopped trading a couple of months ago as I got into online poker and found it more entertaining than the market plus the fact that I actually make money at it. I put a couple of hundred in an account and after a couple of weeks I was able to take that money out and play on winnings. Over several weeks I built the account up to $1300. Then a couple of weeks ago I was doing a little drinking and decided to play. I got smacked right away getting a couple of good hands beat. So I went to higher limit and the same thing happened. I got a little hot and moved into a nolimit game. To make a long story shorter, in the matter of a few hours I blew a big chunk of my winnings. This is exactly the kind of behaviour that hurt me trading. I havent had anything to drink since and am slowly building my account back up again. I also am back in the market as I think I have learned something about myself. We'll see.
Thanks for posting. I had a similiar experience recently. I was getting frustrated by micro-limit players staying in for the river card to beat my flopped AAA, turning their 4-8 offsuit pockets played from EP into straights - I wanted to find a way to punish these players for their statistically sketchy play. So I registered for a one-table No-Limit tournament - $5 buy-in and the pool split by the top 3 finishers. I found this kind of play very enjoyable, since I could make marginal players pay for their marginal calls. After doing fairly well at these tournaments, I thought - 'why not play some actual real-money No-Limit'- i.e. a ring game where one is not betting points but betting with actual money. So I sat down at a .25/.50 blinds No-Limit game. I did all right at first and then I had a big winning session. "This is it!!", I thought, and congratulated myself for finding the 'real game', the place where the best players hang out. Forget Limit Hold-Em. Then... one day I sat down and got handed my head on a platter almost immediately - went all-in with my A high flush to be beaten by a player with a flopped boat. He was slow playing the boat and matched my all in on the river after the 5th diamond fell for me on the turn (we had both called a small turn bet by another player. I am still trying to figure out whether my all-in was the right bet... he would certainly have bet big had I checked... would I have called? Would have had to, I guess...). I immediately bought in again and proceeded to lose 2 big pots in a row trying to go all in - in both cases I had great pockets which were missed by the flop. The last all-in, in retrospect, was the classic 'I'm on tilt' play. No-Limit is interesting in the sense that it may demand even more discipline than Limit. You can lose a big chunk of your stake in one hand - in this case, you must find a way to remain calm and follow your plan in order to get it back - at least, this seems to me to be the case. The bigger the loss, the more the emotional effect, right? Well... for ME this was certainly the case, but... This apparent fact also shed some light on the whole idea of success in poker... and in trading?? I hope I am not repeating my self here - what is clear to me is that the best players must have a way to forget about the fact that they are playing with money - i.e. the value of the money must be a non-issue. You can't think "Oh my God - I just lost $xxxx" I have just opened my first futures trading account. I am going to try to remember that if I get my head handed to me on a trade by an unforseen event - that is, if I make a good decision and it turns bad on me, the last thing I want to do is to jump back in to the markets with the idea of making up my losses. Perhaps the best thing to do is to take a day or two off... although this seems to me to be a sign of potential weakness; in a perfect world, one could trade like an automaton - that is, if you get your head handed to you and then a good trade comes up moments later, you can take it according to your own rules - i.e. don't try doubling or tripling your bet size. Easyrider, thanks once again for your honesty.
You have made clearer a mindset I have held for a long time. However, as in most things I am ever posed with a dilemma of some sort. I am not trying to play devil's advocate to you so much as I am airing out the thought process I undergo everytime I think to myself the kind of things you posted. So here goes: Assumption: Emotions are the enemy. Well, most people act on emotions far too much, especially in such endeavors as trading where it is so crucial to be calm and calculating. So, by controlling emotions one does better than this great majority of participants. And, to take this to its logical extreme, as you have traderNik, trading as an automoton is best. But then, maybe there are aspects to trading other than pure execution. Don't experienced traders get "gut" feelings which lead them to tremendous profits? I don't know this for fact, but it seems to jive with my own experience. As a collegiate pitcher and also as a poker player, it seemed my best performances were conjoined with a charge which, although maybe not best classified as emotional, certainly contained aspects other than pure logical execution. I had felt in many a hands of poker that I'd picked up on something intangible that had given me an edge. Of course, many gamblers say they have such experiences because they get a thrill from victory. But, this is not what I mean. In order to prove this to myself I added to my poker playing log, something I kept at the time to track profits and losses, a new piece of data. Whenever I played hands or a series of hands with this "gut feeling" I added an asterisk next to my normal data. I had never done anything with this asterisk until reading your message traderNik, but now have - and have discovered something. Of the roughly 20% of hands where I had seen the flop I won roughly 50% of my hands. This is for all hands, asterisk hands included. Now, of the 20% of hands where I had seen the flop and from that point had a "gut feeling" I had won 73% of my hands! This is by no means proof, but is surely evidence that although one should generally avoid emotions in decision making there certainly exists something in addition to raw logical and automated decision-making. To paraphrase A. Einstein, I feel I've presented my point both rather sharply and long-windedly...but thankyou for the inspiration, Rich
Hi rlb21079 and thanks for the response. You bring up some very interesting points, and I'd like to 'think out loud' about a few of them here. I want to emphasize that what is to follow, in keeping with the original spirit of this thread, is primarily for the consideration of the beginning trader - experienced traders and poker players are encouraged to comment in order to help the beginners out. What I want to say first is IN NO WAY an attempt at refuting the points you make - it's just a clarification. When I was speaking about emotion, I should have made it clearer that I was referring MAINLY to the emotions one experiences after a big loss (or a big win, for that matter). How do we allow that emotional state to affect our subsequent trading or playing decisions? It's the 'tilt factor' that interests me in this situation, since, although I fancy myself a pretty objective, disciplined guy, I have watched myself go on tilt and later asked myself 'What in the heck were you doing there, anyway?'. But much more interesting is the general question you raise about the involvement of 'non-logical' or non-rational' information in our decisions. Are emotions always the enemy? I have of course had that 'gut feeling' experience when playing poker - and although I haven't kept the stats you have, I suspect that the majority of outcomes which were influenced by these feelings end up in my favour! As a musician by trade, I am used to going with my intuition in improvisational situations. And certainly, I feel that there is more than a little intuition involved in trading, whether one is studying charts for swing trading time frames or reading tape for very short term scalping situations. One old saw that I heard when I was starting my research was 'never average down'. This seemed clear enough to me - but then I read an interview with a money manager of 25 years standing who said that he will average down if it 'seems like the right thing to do at the time'!! A clearly intuitive decision as opposed to a purely logical one. In every trading book I have ever read, I hear the pro's saying things like 'I just had a feeling that the Canadian dollar was going up' or "IBM was looking weak so I shorted it". Now, chart reading can be a pretty subjective exercise - otherwise, everyone would be making money, right? The hard right edge looks different to me than it does to you - all those buyers and sellers prove it. What exactly is meant by 'looking weak'? What does the poker pro mean when he says "I saw something in my opponents eyes that made me call his all-in"? Surely this kind of information is as important as the volume and price data So how do I come to believe that one should 'trade like an automaton'? Well... I guess in the end, I don't!! The only situation in which this may be advisable might be that in which _beginning_ traders find themselves. I guess I might be willing to at least attempt to defend an argument which goes something like this - 'For the first 6 months, make your decisions according to a strict plan - take emotion completely out of the equation, but _make a log of those situations in which you have a strongly intuitive or gut feeling about something_. Then after a certain period, see how you would have done with your gut calls as opposed to going with the automaton approach. In trading and in poker, should one build up a body of experience, gained using a strictly rational approach, before making the gradual shift towards a 'hybrid' method of decision making? In doing my research into trading, I have heard so many times that the number 1 consideration is money management and risk control. Of course, this is most important in losing rather than winning situations. What do you do when a position goes the wrong way? You have a capital base of $25,000, so you will risk no more than 2% of that capital on any one trade. You buy 100 shares of XYZ at $50.00. It goes up to 51.00 the next day, and the day after that it opens at $51.60 and you are feeling good about life. Then you go to the golf course and dream about the day you will play Pebble Beach for the first time, and then you get home and check the quote and it is at $44.75, and there are 20 minutes left in the trading day. What do you do? The seasoned veteran may be able to draw on a lot of non-rational, intuitive cues in making a decision because he has seen this kind of thing happen so many times that he can distinguish between crises that are really just tempests in teapots and those that can lead to disaster. For the beginner, though, is it advisable to close this trade out immediately, regardless of what one thinks may or may not happen? For the beginning Hold-Em player, is it always advisable to fold 99 in EP until one has the ability to read a table well enough to recognize situations in which you can be almost sure that you can outplay your opponents over a 3 hour session, no matter what their cards? So now you know the true meaning of 'long-winded' In the end, I am certain you're right when you say that there comes a time when " there... exists something in addition to raw logical and automated decision-making". rlb, please do respond, and thanks a lot for posting your thought-provoking comments here. Hopefully some others will join the discussion.