The back of 6-max
I’ve now played around 87,000 hands of 6-max at various levels since the beginning of the year, after switching from full-ring at which I played around 50,000 hands. That’s a lot of times to decide whether to check, bet, raise or fold. I wonder how many people in normal jobs have made 240,000 decisions that affect their take-home pay. Ever.
But break it down. By far the hardest decisions are the ones that occur post-flop. Pre-flop play is usually straightforward: you know which hands you like to play and where, and just do it on auto-pilot. So what’s the difference between full-ring and 6-max for post-flop decisions (let’s call them PFD’s)?
It works out that I’ve made 30,000 post-flop decisions at full-ring playing in those 50,000 hands, seeing 245 hands per hour. That’s 147 PFD/hour. I’ve won at 1.2BB/100 hands during that time, so each 100 PFDs have earned 2BB.
At 6-max the corresponding numbers are 80,000 PFDs, 313 hands per hour, 287 PFDs/hour, a winrate of 0.87BB/100 hands, and just 0.91BB/100 PFDs.
Are you still with me? It means that not only am I forced to make twice as many stressful decisions in each hour of 6-max play, but each one has been earning me half as much as in a full-ring game.
Theoretically each PFD you get to make correctly earns you money against opponents making PFD’s wrongly. So the more PFD’s you make, the more money you make. It hasn’t worked out like that for me, and I wonder if has for you? I’d speculate that it doesn’t quite happen like this because a large portion of winrate comes from pre-flop not post-flop decisions.
I’ve learnt a lot playing 6-max. All the usual things about isolation, aggression and blinds-play. I think that it is still the most potentially profitable way to play limit hold’em. But you have to be able to sustain an absurdly high decision-making rate. And I can’t keep doing it.
It’s time to get back into the full-ring.