Pump up the variance

Now that I'm mixing in .02/.05 I'm starting to get larger swings per hand. I have played .01/.02 with .40 or .70 buy-ins depending on the table. Now that I'm moving up I am getting in for either $1 or $1.75. So early in the session I have mostly penny tables with a couple of nickels and I flop trip fives. I bet, get raised, think it over and eventually stack off to a flopped boat though I did have higher boat outs which didn't materialize. Bye bye buy in. Against my better judgment I then started replacing penny tables with nickel tables until I eventually had all nickel tables on my screen. Hello swinginess. I rationalized it to myself by recognizing that I am actually over-rolled for just playing penny tables. Even when I have all of my screen full I have less than 5% of my roll in play at one time across all the tables combined. Well no time like the present to dive in and see how the nickel players live. Much different game than just one level below. When people bet they have it, surprise. Seems like position is used more effectively as well.

I ran kings into aces. Didn't get paid on my monster hands like flopping quad kings. I was on the button and picked up kings and was going to pop it against a limped table but just realized that I would get a waterfall so I just limped and then I flop quads. At least I had position and extracted probably the maximum I could after a guy finally rivers the nut flush on a KKQQx board. I told myself I'm going to have to start pumping up the pots that I enter since my range is so small I need to get compensation for paying blinds and folding. Later in the session I pick up kings again, do I follow my advice? Nope. What's the flop hold? Two more kings again. Slow learner I guess.

Overall I had a much wilder ride. At one point being down $7.42 until bringing it back to being down $2.56 and almost even with rakeback. Good experience though and I'm getting way more comfortable with the nickel stakes. All told a pretty cheap lesson relatively speaking. The other nice thing about the session is that results tracked EV pretty closely. In general I won when I was ahead and lost when I was behind.

It's never easy. It would have been uber-convenient if the play was exactly the same at the nickel tables and I could just increase my earn rate by 2 1/2 times but it doesn't work that way evidently. The immersion in the .02/.05 world was enough to tell me that I'm going to have to make more adjustments, betting in position when I don't have "it" is one of the things. But I successfully tweaked my game for .01/.02 so it's just a matter of analyzing what I need to do.

Chart of the swings below.