First 500 hands
Art.Cascade, Oct 03 2012
I've been a starcraft player since beta (sc1 beta!) and have always seen many tired starcraft players go to poker and earn some money on their skills. Why not me? 
So first thing I did was to go to pokerstrategy (because they sponsored TSL3 or something) and find a pretty beginner friendly set of strategy articles, and better yet, some free money that I can get on titan poker. I go through the articles, find out that I should play as a TAG and to the 0.01/0.02 tables I go!
And this what is has come out from the first week or so:
I sit and fold my way through preflop (12% VPIP), following the chart from pokerstrategy. This is what gives the slow declining trend in the red curve above. Folding blinds, or occasionally raising/checking only to fold to the reraise.
Once at flop, I generally fold/check if I don't have a good made hand. Occasionally though I do a continuation bet from a weak made hand or just from position + villian check with nothing (or raise because I actually hit). People sometimes react to cont bet with a raise, which makes it easy for me (fold!), or they fold (yay!). These are the jumps in the red curve.
But most often they just call my cont bets, which just makes me confused... Say that I have pocket pair jacks, i raise preflop, someone calls. Flop is (for example) 2, 6, Q rainbow. I bet about 70% of pot OOP (should I?) to try to figure out if villain hit on the queen or not. Villain call. Another harmless turn. What do I do then? A villian with higher pocket pair or hit on the queen would raise me I assume, but anything lower would probably fold. There are very few draws on the table... AK maybe?
Anyway, a handful of times I actually got a strong made hand on the flop, bet, and got someone to reraise or at least check my bets all the way to showdown. This is the blue curve, and is the reason I am going plus.
I guess I should be happy that I am going plus from day 1, but I still feel completely lost after flop, and the only reason I feel comfortable preflop is that I have my chart to follow... My most subtle play is the occasional continuation bet.
Sometimes I see people coming to my table (I tried playing 2 tables at once, and omg did I get confused!) and play really a lot of hands, VPIP of like 60/70%. And they manage to somehow outplay (or something) the others at the flop and will go from 2 dollars up to 6 or 8 in half an hour, while I take two hours to get from 2 to 3 with some luck. They dont seem like the fishes that dont have any clue, at least not to me. Have these guys understood something about the game that I havent, or are they just lucky? I would like to be able to do that as well!
I guess I should read some articles on basic play on flop. Or at least reread the ones at pokerstrategy. Any other suggestions on articles or other material?
Special thanks to Rapoza for first help, and to Fudyann for recommending fpdb!
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