Stone cold. Quick question if you dont mind.
Started playing (mainly) 18man sngs on stard last night, gonna give them a good grind, or so was my intention.
Had success so far, but when you play, do you not find the seemingly very very very small winnings you can have at micro stakes life tilting?
hope you had a good christmas 
Did have a good Christmas thanks, working all this week :-(
But off all of next to make up for it :-) So after the New Year festivities are over and done with I will be starting the 2012 grind and am looking forward to smashing it next year.
The seemingly very very small winnings are indeed a massive issue. Yes, I agree, it can be really tilting. It"s also easy to start letting your expectations get out of control. As I have mentioned previously I did that at the start of this year based mainly on running like god for the second half of 2010.
In my case this has lead to me playing for too long and playing at times where I am just not in the right frame of mind or when I am not feeling 100% (for example a little bit tried after a long day in work). This makes a losing session more likely and this has happened to me time and time again, you then think you will just play a little longer to try and get it back to even, which is the worst thing you can do. As I have said before I have lost more money this way than any other this year.
What I think the best thing to do is plan out what you want to achieve each month and check it is realistic. In my case I know that playing $25nl cash games I tend to run at about 4BB/100 hands when playing well. So if I play say 10K hands per month (which is very doable) . Therefore my expectation per 100 hands is $2. So my expectation for the month is $200. But I don"t always play well so I may actually only run at 3BB/100 so realistically I can only expect $150. Which is less than £100. You need to decide if this makes it worth your while.
Another problem is that you can swing more than the monthly expectation is a day relatively easily, I have had 3 days this month where I have won or lost more than 4 buyin"s). When you win you have to keep expectation in check and when you lose you have to not get to tilted by it. I think (hope) I have learned a bit about that this year and expect to be much better at this in 2012. I am going to post goals before the end of this week.
In your 18 man sit n go"s I am told that an ROI of 20% is really excellent (can a sit n go player correct me on this if I am wrong my knowledge on this is not great). So you can expect to win $1 per sit n go. If you multi table them using tools like Table Ninja and of course Poker Tracker/Hold'em Manager then your ROI will go down but you play more so your actual monthly profit goes up as you play more. If I was to play 18 manner"s I would set a target of an ROI of 10% for the first month and see if that can be achieved. If you play 200 of them your expected profit is $100.
So I guess what I am saying is the best thing you can do is set your goal at the start of the month and keep it in mind throughout. It"s not easy to do and far to easy to get carried away with short term good results and tilted over short term bad result"s. Try to limit a session to x number of sit n go"s and stick to that (if you lose accept it as you will get more good sessions than bad one"s and this will wipe out the bad sessions but they WILL happen). Don"t get too down on yourself over mistakes everybody makes them.
So with micro stakes it is a question of if you can be bothered to grind out the small wins and hot your monthly target. I would say though this is the best way of making a consistent profit at online poker.
I went on for much longer than I meant too there but I am fairly confident that it is accurate. Hope you do decide to make a go of the $5/$10 sit n go"s. Would be very interesting to follow your progress.
