What’s it like to play a third of all the hands dealt to you?

Let me tell you, it's a lot of fun.  You're like a giant suckout machine, and people constantly curse you for being a donkey. 

I'm experimenting with a new starting Limit Hold'em hand set I created using pokerstove for a style I've named "Drunken Master".  Chris and Katie are familiar with this style, it's a wildly loose aggressive style that pushes the absolute limit of the mathematical leeway for preflop looseness.  It tends to work best against novice players that can be frustrated with your "awful" play, and play poorly postflop. 

For example, you call a raiser with QJo in position and if you catch a queen or a jack on the flop, you call down depending on the board.  Novice players tend to overplay their overcards and underpairs post flop, and this strategy catches a lot of pots that should otherwise be lost when you fold postflop in position.

Like most poker strategies, there are not hard and fast rules here.  You can't randomly call down with four opponents on the flop, or if you get stuck in the middle of a raising war between two players.

In practice, PokerTracker says my I'm putting money in voluntarily about 34% of the time, which means I'm playing roughly one third of my hands before the flop, though I'm folding on the flop a lot.  That number is just insane, and will get tuned down below 30% before I'm done honing this.  In the meantime it's really fun to play a full third of your hands.

What's more fascinating is that I'm losing about 3.91 big bets an hour, which means that at the stakes I'm running this experiment on ($.05/$.10 through $0.50/$1) I'm losing $1.96 / hour.  I'm 30 hours and 3,200 hands into it, and I've sworn to make it to about 5k before evaluating the hands in PokerTracker, so I'm logging as many hands as possible.  I'm two-tabling as well, since if you two table on Full Tilt Poker this month for 25 days they give you $50.  Over the next 30 hours, I'll probably lose another $60.  Between rakeback and the $50 bonus, I should be about even, though that isn't sustainable long term.

If you didn't start the month with the Full Tilt Take Two (Two Tabling) bonus, they might offer another, so keep an eye out.