Half a year is not all that much time, in terms of online poker playing, especially if
you are only playing two hours per day. A better metric is hands played. The old rule I
always hear is to not make any judgments about the skill of a player until he or she
has played at least 100k hands.
Going on tilt is not always that obvious. You can be on
tilt and not even really know it. That is soft tilt. Hard tilt is what most people
consider "tilt." That is when you just really get mad and upset and you just can't play
any hand with good decision making. It just takes time and experience to be able to
approach the game in the exact mental and emotional state you'd like to play in.
Meditation can help you control those things, but it also takes time to practice.
There
is bluffing, and there is c-betting. They are related, but not necessarily the same. A
c-bet with no made hand is a lot like a bluff. But when you do things like float to 4th
and 5th street with no made hand and no real draws, with plans to represent whatever
better made hand might appear on the board as its texture changes from street to street
to showdown, you are bluffing for sure. The post flop c-bet is similar, but different
in the sense that if you are called, you can still back out and avoid more disastrous
results that usually occur on 5th street/showdown bluffs gone wrong. You also have the
opportunity to turn the c-bet/semi bluff type betting into a made hand with draws or
just plain lucky turns and rivers. So, making a c-bet with only a backdoor flush draw
might seem like a bluff/semi bluff, but if you runner runner the backdoor flush, you
are about as far from a bluff as you can get. But if your backdoor flush does not come,
you might get a card on the river that still allows you to make a good bluff attempt,
while holding no made hand at all.
The players at higher stakes with more skill and
experience are just going to be far more unpredictable than most players at lower
stakes. They have so much experience taking in all of the information being conveyed,
inadvertently or otherwise, that this whole game starts to become like second nature to
them, and so they can sit and play for 8 to 10 hours a day and stay sharp the entire
time because they are able to almost effortlessly accomplish a lot of the things that
less skilled and less experienced players require considerably more effort and
concentration to do. They have seen way more hands and have played with way more
players, and they can use this to their advantage by having far more knowledge about
all of the potential moves their opponents might try to make on them.
The only thing
that will turn you into a robotic player is yourself. Whether you are sticking to low
and micro stakes, or you are dabbling in mid and high stakes to try to get a feel for
where you are trying to go, it is up to you how you play and what habits and patterns
you exhibit, and how you play around with them in order to try to make yourself harder
to pin down and predict
You mentioned a lot about how it was confusing and hard to
predict what the players might be doing and what cards they might be playing with. You
don't really want to be trying to pin down the exact two cards that your opponents
have, but instead to narrow down a potential "range" of card combinations that a
particular player might be playing. If you see the player folding UTG for a relatively
prolonged period of time, only to see them limp or open with a raise UTG, you might be
able to predict what their potential range for UTG opens is, just by noticing that the
player rarely ever plays from that position, and by noting what they do play with
whenever you get to see their cards at showdown. Because that is the most vulnerable
position, most players commit to only playing it with their premium range of card
combos, like AJ-AK suit/off, or pairs from 8s to aces for example. But if you notice
the player is playing almost any two UTG, just to try to mix it up and seem more
unpredictable, you can exploit that too and use that info to your advantage. This
doesn't always work, as this game of ours has such a strong component of luck involved,
but it is sort of like getting AA: most of the time it should work out well for you,
but we all know that it cannot work out every single time. And the more advanced the
player pool, the more difficult time you will have using the information conveyed at
the table to your advantage, as the higher the skill level, the more effort and work is
being put into trying to remain unpredictable to opponents.
I'm not really a big cash
game player, but I think what one might tell you to do is to slowly enter the next
stake level you are eyeing. Don't just fully commit to the higher stake games, instead
decide on a percentage of the overall time you plan on playing that day or that week
and only play, for example, 10% of your time in the higher stake level. After that time
is up, go back to playing at the lower level. Then just slowly increase that % to
whatever you feel comfortable with, while slowly acclimating to the differences between
the stake levels, like a slow taper upward. That is a pretty smart way to do it, I
think; it helps you keep roll management rules in tact while also helping you get used
to the higher stakes.
