Why I’m on Full Tilt

I’ve been playing on Pokerstars mostly for a while now.  With no real explanation I seem to just run better at PS than at FT.  I looked at my hand history very critically today and I don’t see anything strange about the hands at FT.  For whatever reason, though, I’m convinced I’ll do better in the long run at PS.

Here’s a graph of my results on PS for the last two weeks.

I still have $60+ at FullTilt, so tonight I decided to give it another chance.  Perhaps I’m just playing better overall and so FT deserves another chance.  My first real winning hand tonight was when I was dealt KK and was up against AA and flopped a set.  It felt typical.  I was up fpr some time and then ran up against a few sets myself and…well…check out this sick session…

By about hands 385, I had resigned myself to losing every dollar I had in the account.  But I want to stress something.  I played the same game the whole way.  I made very good decisions all night.  I played my standard 20/12/1.5 game.  I think I play well enough to be a winning player at this level.  At least on PS I think that’s true.  On FullTilt?  661 hands of break even poker.

I do have an observation.  It seems like there’s more “fanciness” at FT.  I see more terrible bluffs and huge re-raises and kicker wars on FullTilt.  At PS, they seem to play a little more real live poker.  They play like the money matters, like they want to keep their money, even if it is only $25.  Also at FT, it was almost impossible to find a table that had less than 3 short stackers and even if you did, some would show up in no time.  At PS, 1 to 2 seems to be more normal.

In the end, I wasn’t able to get rid of that $65, but I’m not sure I’ll be back at FT any time soon.