Figuring out how to maximize my roi

My game has come a long way over the last few years. I believe that the time I have spent at the tables and doing my due diligence studying has increased my understanding of the game. But I want to break it down for a couple of reasons. One so you guys know exactly where I am when I play so u can stack me, also I want to find out where my strengths are and what areas that I can improve on. Playing a lot of different games, and soon enough learning the rest of the horse spread, at least getting better at plo hi/lo, stud, razz, draw, and limit he.

A quick summary of my game for the 10th time. Played pretty consistently with my degen high school friends for about 3 years and about 20 hours a week playing a variety of games that helped me understand the swings along with learning to read people and what play would maximize my returns(probably at this point it was something that was helping my decisions but not something I really focused on).

I started playing online, doing fairly well with a free $10 I got on prima and built that up to around a grand and then read a limit book and lost it back. In the grand skeem of things I am a losing player online, with a few decent tourney scores 200 here 600 there, only to put it back into tourneys and not finishing enough to cover the rest that I enter and blow up in early. It's funny when it comes to tourneys for me, I will go very deep if I can get passed the first 20minutes. In the beginning I flip a lot and go for shots to build a stack to push for later in the tourney. But it doesn't make that much of a difference doubling up in the beginning as that stack will be nothing to call home about when we lose half the field in an hour or so. So the risks i'm taking along with the fact that the people around me are usually pretty bad sounds like -ev.

If I just sat out the first 3 levels or so I think it would help me out, as I would be getting stats on them and understand there vpip, pfr, and there overall aggression. I think i'm going to go a little more conservative when playing in the earlier stages of the tourney's i play in. I would be able to get to the money more often, but i would be losing a little equity by not having a larger stack coming close to the bubble, but i would be able to outplay them and get my money in ahead and overall I think I would do better cashing. But one other theory of play is to have a larger stack and take some risks early on so that you can still take some bad beats and be able to have a decent stack if you are aggressive and are ok with flipping early on.

Something needs to change, as my play is good especially for the buy in amount and the level of competition that i am up against. I just need to stay in the mix of things and give myself a chance to make a run later, instead of trying to get a lot of it done early on. If I make the money twice as much with a smaller stack I think in the long term it would put me in position to do better as when blinds get pretty big compared to stack size I will be able to make better decisions.

When playing in cash games there are some things that I have recently learned that have opened up a few new cans of worms. Playing mostly $25 and 50$ 6max nlhe and plo I have gotten to the point where 3 betting is coming into play with weak holdings as I have a read on the other player trying to steal the pot from my continuation bet. When it comes to plo, i just can't get paid off and don't think i have the br to play this game properly. I have lost a decent amount getting it all in with the nuts with no redraw and losing about half the time to the redraw. I still don't understand hand values and value betting in plo to play the game to be a winner. I'm going to take some time off from plo cash, still play some of the tourney's as the mistakes that are made by the opponents are so big in these games that my lack of knowledge in the game is made up for picking my spots and utilizing the tools i have learned from nlhe.

It's hard for me to watch the paint dry and play full ring, but I imagine that the game there would be good as long as I played enough tables. Need to concentrate on playing premium hands and maybe do some set mining and try to get pot odds/implied odds to draw to big hands. It's going to take some time on my side to play in the full ring efficiently again compared to the run and gun style of 6max.

I started reading hoc 1 again and i'm looking forward to learning a lot more from it as I gained a good understanding of the mistake game that was recapped from theory and nltap.

More to come soon.