What do you play and why?

[EscapePlan9]

I almost exclusively stick with playing LHE online. Occasionally I'll still play some SNGs, but I really appreciate and enjoy LHE more. I've thought of many reasons why this is the case.

1) The pot odds and hand odds actually matter! With NLHE, you almost never have the odds to continue with any draw whatsoever. Even calling with an open-ended straight flush draw is a huge risk against pot-bets on NLHE. I really like being able to play hands past the flop. It's entertaining continuing in big pots with draws like bottom pair, overcard, and backdoor flush draw. That would be an easy fold in NL!

2) When someone sucks out on you at limit, you lose an extra BB. When someone sucks out on you at NL, you lose your entire stack.

3) Capping multi-way flops with huge draws (or huge hands) is fun!

4) I feel like LHE is an easier and less riskier game to "master" than NLHE.

5) Making judgment calls when someone bets a scare card isn't as brutal with limit as NL. Say there's 10 bets in the pot and it costs you 1 to see if he's bluff betting the flush card - you only need to be right 10% of the time! In NL, you'd probably have to call an all-in or huge bet to find out - you need to be right closer to 50% of the time!

6) Losing in fourth place at SNGs is torturous. You just played for forty minutes, was short-stacked and pushed with 99 on the bubble, and someone has AA.

7) When you lose in a SNG to someone sucking out on you, you cannot buy back in and think "I'll easily take this guys money!". You're out. All your time has been wasted. In any other game, you welcome these players even when they suck out on you. At SNGs, it's just brutal.

The original reason I switched from predominately playing SNGs to predominately playing LHE was the massive amount of suck outs and terrible situations on the bubble. I still had a little over 30% ROI at the SNGs, but I was getting too stressed out from playing them.

I still occasionally play them. And I'm always reminded why I cannot tolerate playing them too consistently.

Like I remember a couple days ago firing up some SNGs after not playing them for a month. One of my first hands is AA, I raise 4x the BB and get two callers. The flop comes A78 rainbow. I bet nearly the size of the pot and one person calls. The turn is a T. He checks, and I push (betting slightly more than the pot size). He calls with 96 for the straight. The board doesn't pair on the river and I'm out in 10th place!