Busy, busy, busy

Things have been flat out for me lately. A new Asian airline has started flying into the gold coast, and has done an opening special of $99 flights to Malaysia. I managed to get a couple of weeks off work to take a holiday up there, but I promised to get everything up to date before I leave this Thursday. That means 14 or 15 hour days at work to get everything sorted, but it will all be worth it once I get on the plane. I'm heading over to Malaysia for 4 days, then over to Bangkok for a week.

Poker wise I've been a bit short of time, and as tired as a dog, but I've still managed to play about 10,000 hands over the last week. I've been 12 tabling the NL50 because I've been too tired to play NL100. I tried 15 tables last Friday, but with only a 20" monitor ran out of places to fit 15 tables, so it was a bit of a disaster. Will save the 15 tabling until I get a 24" monitor.

Now that I've played over 200,000 at both NL50 and NL100 I thought that I would list some of the differences that I've noticed between the two levels:

• Continuation betting: NL50 player seem to love to check raise on the flop. It doesn't matter if they have a hand or not, they like to give the check raise a shot. This means that if I have position I'll often check my missed flops at NL50, and bet my monster hands. In NL100 I find the continuation bet works a lot better, and unless I have a good reason not to, I will always continuation bet any raise I make before the flop.
  
• Calling stations: NL50 has a lot more calling stations that are prepared to commit most of their stack on top pair with a good kicker. This mean playing fairly straight forward poker at NL50 bet with a hand, check-fold with no hand. In NL100 you need to mix it up a lot more and try to trick your opponents more often.
  
• No of people seeing the flop: With NL50 you defiantly get a lot more caller before the flop, meaning you can play a lot more hands, and I don't raise as much in NL50 with medium hands as I am going to get plenty of callers, with someone likely to hit it more than me. In NL100 you get a lot more raising and 3 betting, so you get to see a lot less flops so need to try and extract maximum value from you big hands.
  
• 
  Maximizing value: Often when opponents hit the nuts at NL50 they will bet the minimum, scared everyone will fold. Quite often I will be amazed how a NL50 player will bet $4 into a $25 pot with the nuts. In NL100 players will nearly always try to extract maximum value from their huge hands.
  

In summary it is safe to say that NL100 players are a lot more aggressive. This isn't always a bad thing but you do need to play the two levels a lot differently. In NL50 you can fold a lot of average hands and wait until you get a monster, knowing there is a good chance you will get paid off. In NL100 you need to get value out of a bigger range of hands to end up ahead. I certainly enjoy playing the NL50 games a lot more, but can still make a higher overall profit at NL100.

I'm heading overseas on Thursday, but hope to get another post in before I go. I doubt that I will get much chance to post while on Holiday, so there might not be a lot happening here over the next week or so.