H.O.R.S.E. Play
Ended January a small winner — no great shakes, but better than being in the red. Was kind of a goofy month, really. Started with one super-crummy session of PLO on New Year’s Day, then had a lot of non-poker stuff gettin’ in the way of playing, prolonging my efforts to get “back to quits” (as they say). So I was in a hole for most of the month, finally climbing out of it here during the last week.
Stuck mostly with PLO for the month, though I did play more H.O.R.S.E. during January than I probably have before during any given a 31-day stretch. Looking back through the little black Moleskine notebook in which I log all my sessions, I see I played a little over 1,400 hands of H.O.R.S.E. in January, and one MTT tournament. I played about 60 hands of $1/$2 and a dozen at $0.25/$0.50; otherwise, the rest were all at the $0.50/$1.00 tables.
Am a bit surprised to see that I finished a little over $14 to the good playing H.O.R.S.E. in January. (I also won $4.50 in that MTT.) I generally felt comfortable at the tables, but never had much of a sense how I was doing. In fact, looking back, most of my sessions were winners — if not for one semi-tilty session where I dropped 26 clams, I might have ended up with a decent win rate.
Kind of hard to track H.O.R.S.E. play. I’m not aware of any PokerTracker-like programs that’ll neatly log your sessions for you. And, of course, you end up with five separate text files (one for each game) in your hand history folder, making it a bit arduous to go through and piece the session back together.
Gonna try to come up with some way of keeping track of how I’m playing H.O.R.S.E. I’d especially like to get a sense of how I’m doing in each of the five games. My feeling is I might be bleeding a bit in Omaha/8, getting involved with so-so starting hands and losing some of what I’m picking up in the other games. In fact, to my surprise, I find I am most enjoying/most comfortable with the three stud games — Razz, Stud, Stud/8. One thing I’m noticing is that when we get back around to Hold ‘em & O/8, the play gets really loose and unpredictable, which tends not to suit me all that well. (I think a lot of players are so happy to see flops again, they start playing any old crap.) Meanwhile I’m usually eager to get back to Razz, if you can believe that.
Anyone got any tips on tracking H.O.R.S.E. Or just playing the game?
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Comments
I’m really trying to get into HORSE, partly because I read on alwaysbluff.com that some good players said they were averaging double their usual hold ‘em BB/100 playing mixed games. Stud Hi is my 2nd-favorite game so I’d like to try this, but the problem is I know nothing about split-pot games; I’ve played Stud split once (by accident online) and never played a single hand of Omaha/8.
As far as learning HORSE, Mike Matusow has a good chapter on omaha/8 in the Full Tilt Strategy Guide, and I think the original super/system deals pretty extensively with Stud Hi/Lo and limit hold ‘em.
I find that although alot of players do okay at H-O, most HORSE players are very weak in R-S-E. One trap I fall into sometimes is I am looking for R-S-E hands to play against them. Sometimes though a hand never comes that rotation and you have to wait till the next rotation. But your opposition usually plays so poorly that all you have to do is wait for a good hand and bet it. The hard part is having the patience to wait it out.