(i) Clearly I need (at least) a few hundred hours' more experience.
(ii) The standard deviations (or "variance" as poker players seem to call it) are very high, which is clearly very many people's undoing: I have been reading about it in this excellent book by Mason Malmuth. Specifically, the variance is certainly considerably higher, and much more complicated to analyse statistically, than has been so for other things I have done.
(iii) I suspect that low-stakes playing experience is of only limited value to the higher stake games to which I would obviously need to graduate to make this enterprise worthwhile. In particular, there seems to be a correlation between winning potential and high variance. No-limit games clearly offer greater potential than limit ones. Possibly my original idea of playing sit 'n' go's will be the working compromise solution to this issue ...
I played tonight in a 60-player multi-table tournament, with rebuys (available until the first break - but I did not rebuy) and an optional add-on (which I took) at the first break. There were prizes for nine places, and the prize-fund grew massively, presumably from all the rebuys and double-rebuys made during the first session. It was going well until the last table, where I moved all-in with pocket 9's against one raiser who called, for reasons best known to himself, with 84 offsuit (84o), which I doubt very much whether they do in the higher-stake games, and then promptly knocked me out with two pairs on the turn and river. So I managed only 7th place, admittedly for a decent prize in relation to my 9 Euro outlay including the add-on. Still, I also had my share of good luck earlier on, to have got that far, I suppose. It's not my intention to play many of these, though: too time-consuming ...
Meanwhile, if the going gets any worse at Salisbury, I might just have a decent, each-way, long-shot bet on Raffish in the 5.20 later today, at a hoped-for big price: superficially a stinker, but a handicap topweight who has once won over a similar distance on heavy going under the same jockey, a 5-lb claimer. I'd like to see "soft-to-heavy" at least, for this bet; so we'll see ...
