in live play i always like to open usually 3 times the big blind, i like to play nearly all my hands the same way, i dont like limping i like to be aggressive and loose and dictate what goes on the table and take advantage of it when i can, but online that all goes out the window i always end up getting bossed about, its like players online are maniacs.
i never seem to be able to win online ive had a handful of cashes but no wins i always have to tighten up and i manage to stay afloat above the chip average and plod along but have never found a way of being able to get up amongst the chip leaders.
loose play doesn"t seem to work and tightening up wont win me anything, i know you must sacrifice a few paid places to give yourself the chance to win but what the hell is going wrong? im finding it impossible to get right!
wowser this is difficult to answer,there is so many potential answers..You need to start breaking your game down and look back at sessions that you play with a crictical eye and try to put aside all pre-conceived ideas of how such and such should be played and identify any weak areas that you may have.Next try to find some players better than yourself to discuss hands/strategy,reads etc etc with..
Common problems that imo hold players back from getting better are -
1. i see a lot of players keep viewing situations as separate entitys and dont look at the stream of events as a whole,hence they end up playing reactive poker with no real planning.
2. players ranges and betting sizes/patterns are not very well balanced which means they end up being easy to read by the better players. [you dont say if your playing cash,mtt or sng and i tried to find some decent material that met get you thinking on this subject,but here is a free video of a guy explaining his strategy on balancing his range of hands when dealing with agg 3bettors that may get your grey matter thinking
http://www.parttimepoker.com/video-calling-as-a-strategy-for-dealing-with-aggressive-three-betting]
3. over esitimating implied odds and because they tend to check fold most flops when they miss when they eventually do hit something big it is so painfully obvious that they mostly dont get paid off.
4. obv - over play top pair hands
5. get in a bad habit of making disgust calls on the river when there 2 pair is outdrawn by some guy chasing a flush draw for example..[even though they know they"re beat on the river they still call,hence the disgust call]
6. They learn by reading books/articles or watch videos etc and then misapply what they learn , for example 3betting very light other players but not taking into account that players calling frequency..Other examples are cbetting and floating at totally wrong times because there reading skills of players and flop textures etc are way way off.
7. only think about there own hand,or if they do think about there opponents styles and hand ranges they forget to take into account how opponents perceive there own possible hands/image, this in turn leads to reading opponent hands wrong because that player maybe playing his hand different based on what he thinks you have.
8. not stack size aware [mtts/sngs]
9. lose patience easily or Tilt when bad beat or if they insist they do not ""tilt"" they do start playing future hands badly
10. play out of position far to much.
i best stop as like i said there are a multitude of things in our games that we can look at, so just experiment,try to improve your reading skills,be honest with yourself and above all learn to accept variance especially in mtts [sometimes volume is the answer]
