new player to cash who is struggling

[Spikelad]

Hi i have recently started playing cash after playing tournaments for about 18 Months.I never thought it would be so difficult to play cash,when i play tournaments i can usually tell where i am in a hand and find decision making fairly straightforward. I am playing 6 max 2/4 pence,i have been playing for a couple of months and find that i am more confused now than when i started.What i find is that if i have a decent starting hand such as pocket aces,aceking suited or a big pair then if i raise say four or five times the bigblind then there are multiple callers. It is good to get called with weaker hands but the downside is that the raghands can hit and bust a decent hand.My mate has given me advice on this and i would like to hear some thoughts. What he is saying is that at microstakes people dont care about the money and basically just play crazy and i will never beat it.He tells me to move up in stakes where they play proper poker and forget microstakes. My thoughts on this are if i cant beat the lowest stake then i have no chance at a higher level and i would be easy prey to the better players. Any advice would be welcome.

[GaF]

Re: new player to cash who is struggling Cash is a more skillful post flop game than tournaments, because your stacks are typically deeper and thus the emphasis shifts from pre flop play (in tournaments) to post flop play (in cash). So in deeper stacked scenarios, your hole cards are less important and implied odds are more significant - this means that hands like Pocket Aces are not as far ahead in cash as they are in tournaments (the odds of them winning if you get to showdown are the same, but the implied odds you are offering are larger, so your punishment when you are outdrawn is larger - assuming your opponent only puts his stack in when he is ahead of pocket aces but folds post flop when the aces are ahead of him). I disagree strongly with the view of your mate. Microstakes may be harder to beat, because the percentage rake you pay is larger, but it should not be harder to beat because your opponents play worse and make more, and larger, mistakes. If you cannot work out counter strategy to poor, non thinking, players, then you will probably end up being crushed by good, thinking, players. I like your thinking far better than your mates thinking! (Lots of the best players claim to have done something like deposited $50 once, and never having deposited again!) If you find that you are getting multiple callers when you raise pre flop 5x with AA, then maybe try larger pre flop raises. This reduces the implied odds you are offering (you still want to be called by worse hands, but you want to get as much of your stack in as you can early in the hand, when you know you are ahead - if you could get all in preflop with AA, then you want to every time, regardless of the number of players in the hand)