i officially miss 100% Night2o1, coz it was awesome having a degen to troll out with at all times. Anyway ive been somewhat hermit since i got to POO GET (Phuket)
IN OTHER NEWS: Here is a picture of Huck Seed and Chobo Poker discussing a lucrative staking deal in Bangkok.
I intended to learn something things about playing the deep tables on PS from this vid: http://www.leggopoker.com/videos/training/724/stream/flv/
but turns out to have much more value for it's humor content and all round cockyness.
Quality bullshitting.
e.g.
he has , having flatted turn on river comes and villian check to jones
“At first I am cuuursing my horrrrible luck. Oh woe is me, this is the most unlucky situation any person has ever been in in their entire life, beating my chest crying like a little girl. But then..”
(analysis about villians range, things he doesn't have, and aejones percived range)
“So I did all the unbelievable mindwork in my head and figured out, pad ping pada pow hes going to fold. And behold the power of position is a great great power”
Stuff he does:
-using voice modulation
-play acting: taking a theme and running with it to the extreme – in this case like someone being upset
-physical theme: noises, actions.
-rythum noise words, like pad ping. Repeating words.
Oh yeah, Learned a little about playing deep I guess
-have to defend a lot wider
-open a little wider with bluffs because of antes
-have to play flops, play the board more than at 100bb
-keep the foot on the gas till they give you a reasons not to
First of all, i'm more or less new to this site, i've been browsing it occasionally for a year or two now. Some people might recognize me from TL where i spend most of my time. I'm Swedish and living in Japan at the moment.
Anyway, the other day when i was on the train on my way to school i was just standing there in this humid train forcing myself to look out the window in an attempt to not accidently get a glimpse of the guy in front of me who had the ugliest, weirdest kind of wig i have ever seen, honestly made me feel like barfing. In order to not keep thinking of that wig and seeing it everytime i closed my eyes i kind of forced myself into thinking about other stuff, and out of nowhere i starting thinking about a post Rek made over at TL some time ago, it was basically a story about how he got started with poker and where it took him etc. I remeber thinking "hey, i can relate to some of that" and the more i thought about it the more it would make sense for me to try to play poker.
Now i'm not sitting here thinking "ok, lemme just pick up poker and then i'll start looking up nice $10million apartments to buy with my inevitable profit" I know that very few people can actually make a living off of playing poker, i would just like to find a new hobby and try to get good at it, and if i can pay for the beer the coming weekend by playing poker then that would be great, but i'm not expecting to turn into a millionare.
I'm the kind of guy that has a hard time getting into new stuff but when i finally find something i really like and i can stick to it forever. Take Starcraft for example, i got into it about 10 years ago and i've been playing it ever since, because i loved the game so much and it was always so fun trying to improve, during this time i never even bothered to play any other games except the occasional game here and there, i was set on becoming better and better at Starcraft. Now the bad thing with my situation is that i often try to pick things up like playing guitar or various other instruments but simply end up quitting because there was no sense of instant gratification, i couldn't see myself progress and that made me really disheartened. Despite this i still think that i might be able to get good enough in poker to be able to enjoy it as a hobby, i love to read up on things and whenever i have time i try to pick up as much information on the subject as possible which to me seems like a good thing.
One thing that makes me wonder though is that many of my friends who play poker are pretty smart and if going by the same logic as used above, they should be really succesfull at poker, however, they are not. Why is that?
I would love to pick up poker and if possible get as good as possible at it, but things like that makes me wonder if it's actually possible through pure effort and dedication or if it's just certain kind of people that "has it" and no matter how much effort i were to put into it i still wouldn't get anywhere. Just for arguments sake, say i wanted to become above average and actually reach that "dream level" where i would be able to support myself through just playing poker, would that actually be possible through sheer dedication and effort? I would be really hesitant to pick something up if there were things in my way that i could do nothing about, i want to have the oppurtunity to be #1 even if the chance of that happening is below 0.1%, i still want to know that there is a chance and that it's all up to me and my efforts.
I feel like i'm losing track of where i was going with this blog post, basically i just want to know what you guys think, should i give it a try? did you feel the same way? etc. I have more or less zero experience with playing poker but to me that makes it all the more fun in the beginning when everything is new. The biggest problem right now with trying to get better would be the fact that i'm living in Japan for at least 3 more months and as far as i know it's illigal to play poker here, don't know about play-money though, in any case practicing here won't happen, but i still want to use this time to learn as much as possible, any suggestions as to how i should go about in learning as much as possible without actually playing? I guess it's also worth mentioning that i'm extremely motivated when it comes to getting better.
Basically what i'm trying to ask is.
Is it worth giving poker a try?
Can everybody become a good poker player?
What is the best possible way to learn without
actually playing?
Wasn't extremely active in poker from April - May because of school/life
End of May, I decided to move my roll to PS and get insta-heatered (good making up for how bad I ran on FTP)
25PLO games on stars are definitely easier than on FTP
There are always more tables running and less regs/a lot more fish
Players are also noticeably less aggressive and easier to play against
In other news, I'm reading a few investment books so I can put my extra monies to good use right away when I graduate from college (going to be a sophomore next year so still a while to go). I'm also extremely excited about going to China next month for a language study program. Life's pretty solid
I'm leaving for san francisco tomorrow morning for a couple days then will be in vegas from june 6 - july 16 ish. Let me know which of your guys will be around and we can arrange a meetup / swap numbers.
Reasons Analysis
What is the most EV+ way to think at the poker table?
Running though a hand; instead of listing ranges on each street like in previous blog, listing specific reasons for acting on each street:
The decision to sit in the game should be weighted several times more heavily than any other decision. The Cardrunners motto: what's your edge? the thought about this is where the professional makes money.
This game is NL200 deep. reasons for playing:
-I have a good understanding of how to use position and suited cards deep
-I can read hands better than they can
-I'm not afraid to run big bluffs
-It's shorthanded with FR nits: they will be out of their comfort zone while I am in my speciality
-Want to challenge myself to work out some complex spots
-Pressure to play in any game cause of my goal
Going Further
Once we have reasons pinned down like this we can look at them and see if they are any good. Its time consuming, but picking one or 2 reasons to look at more in depth could lead to a new insights, or at least, a more concrete feel for the game. If I take the turn "should hit my percived range" then I can work out what that range is, something like [flushdraws: 9Tcc, AQcc, sets: JJ, 77, 22, airball: AKo, QThh, maybe a pair turned into a bluff, 55 ] and also look at what I know about him to confirm if he even thinks about ranges.
Of the reasons we list, we could also give them weight: say how important they are in terms of what made us make the decision. This has a couple of nice effects: it forces the brain to look at which reasons it is actually using, not allowing weak but pretty looking reasons to dominate the thought process. We can stick to core reasons like EV+, pot odds, hand ranges, balanced strategy.
Another way to go further is to try to extend this to guessing why HE is doing the action he is doing. Why did he 3bet pre. Why did he flat call on the flop. What was his dominant thought? This will be more complicated becasue there will be many possible actions that could be going on. he could be bluffing, or valuebetting, or protecting. unlike looking at our hand where we know what we are doing. We have to weight all the reasons that he could have and put them together into a best overall play for us - thus his reasons become a reason for us to do an action http://i263.photobucket.com/albums/ii135/Sophophile/HeadExplode.gif
Mental real estate
Some of these reasons for acting are terrible. And there are others that are even worse, such as
"He raised, DAMM IT. No one, anywhere, ever is an unlucky as me" - whining
"this guy won that last 2 pots off me and now he's going for it again? rghgghh fuck him" - revenge
Alot of them constitute mental clutter. Thoughts should be precious, afterall the quality of thinking is connected to how much money we win. so every time we let in a thought that isn't going to positively effect the EV of the play we are thinking about, we lose a little. It's a waste of good thought-space.
In a way we have to thought-police ourselves: there's only space for a certain number of types of reasons - and often even they have to folded into even more efficient framework, only to be unfolded when a complicated decision needs to me made. Point is, if thoughts about runbad, or revenge are entering your mind during a hand, they are killing your winrate.
I have alot of stuff going on this month. My current lease on my house ends July 28, so I have to find a new house before then, which I think I have. My current landlord has a 3 bedroom 2 full bathroom house that I should be able to get.
Pokerwise, I feel like I have a firm grasp on my current limit. I'm rolled to move up, so I'll probably go ahead and do that after the 1st week of June (or maybe a little after. there are other factors besides my bankroll that go into the decision). So my June goals for poker are to continue learning and improving at the next limit.
Also, I completely fucked up my sleeping schedule during the last week of May. I sleep too far into the day and only get about 4 hours of poker in. It's kind of funny to me, though, because sleeping later has made it mentally easier to play poker because I'm solely playing at a more optimal time. On the other hand, I don't have time to work out, which makes it easier to play poker at the less optimal times because I feel more mentally fresh after I've worked out early and my energy is also up.
I'm going to Bonnaroo, so the excessive drug usage should be a nice break from reality for a few days. Not that my life is bad or anything. It's just alot better when drugs/alcohol (synonymous??) are involved .
Just wondering how many ppl on LP like different kinds of art and shit. I have a buddy that does all kinds of different kinds of abstract art and shit and different sand art(he draws different kinds of designs in the sand) im current waiting on his sandisk full of different art he has sale and wasnt sure if LP was worth uploading some of his work or not. so im going to do a poll and see how many ppl out there are actually inclined see or not if its worth it
I haven't played poker in awhile, since I was preparing for a chess tournament that happened at the end of May. Back into the grinding mood and am running very hot right now. This probably won't keep up but I can always hope .
I've been practicing better table selecting strategies for full ring. It's been helping me a lot to look at the player playing percentage before selecting a table. I've been avoiding tables with all regs and have found tables with a lot more terrible fish than I've used to encounter at NL 10.
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, having flatted turn on 
river comes 
and villian check to jones
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