An Unusual Request

[Festus22]

Well, the going has been pretty tough lately. I'm barely in the green over the past couple of thousand hands. I'm playing Party and Stars $1/2. The players are basically terrible but I'm just not able to take advantage of anything. Am I too tight? Too loose? Too Aggressive? Not aggressive enough? At this point, I have no idea.

So my request is I would GREATLY appreciate if some of you more accomplished S/H players could email me a few hundred of your hand histories. I know I'd be missing reads and notes but I just want to see how you handle certain situations. Readings posts is great but I think there would be no substitute for seeing the more "routine" hands. And lots of 'em.

So if anyone is interested in helping me, send me a PM and I'll give you my email address.

Thanks in advance!!!

[naphand]

Another joke?

If you read the forum regularly you will know that a couple of thousand hands is nothing as far as swings are concerned. You should:

(i) understand that "barely in the green" over 2K is not a bad run, or "rough" it is just flat.

(ii) $1/$2 is not immune from poor runs, even for the best players

If you are panicking after 2K hands without profit you need to forget about playing SH.

[Festus22]

Thanks for your reply and no, my post wasn't a joke.

Perhaps my terminology of "a couple" was inaccurate. My actual count is 7,934 at the moment. And yes, this is miniscule in the grand scheme of S/H play. I'm up $28.

I'm starting out on something I've never tried before and that's playing shorthanded. There's no literature dealing solely on the subject although many poker concepts apply by extension. I thought the recent post by 1800Gambler highlighted a few and was excellent reading.

So at this point, I don't know if I'm playing totally perfect (yeah, right) or am spewing oil. Honestly, that's how I feel. Picking out a hand or two or 10 helps a little but Ed Miller makes a great point in his book that if you're making a little mistake over and over, that adds up to a big problem. The approach to this is just so different that I just don't have a feel for my play relative to the ideal and if I'm making a lot of these fundamental mistakes without realizing it.

What works best for me is learning the concepts and seeing TONS of examples. Slowly but surely, my brain gets it eventually and I was hoping this request could accelerate the process.

I've gotten some offers from some of the posters I have a lot of respect for and I'm extremely grateful for that. And to be honest, I was hoping your name would be there as well.

[easypete]

Festus -

A few of us are getting together in this forum to trade hands for peer review. I think this would help much more than mulling through endless hands.

Link to thread. (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=1410038&page=3&view=colla psed&sb=5&o=14&fpart=1)

[naphand]

OK. Well, chill out, I am not famous for my diplomatic and sensitive posts.

Try to be more specific. If it is 7,934 hands then say 8K, not a "couple of thousand". I am glad you did not post any stats. 7K is enough to start to consider your play more seriously. Unfortunately there is no literature, as you say, apart from the massive archives of this forum. You will find that almost every question that gets asked here each week has been discussed several times already.

I think you would learn very little from seeing any of my histories. Apart from seeing how many dumb mistakes I make, and how everybody has horrible suckouts, you won't have the reads I had at the table. Just be patient and keep playing within your limits, focus on one thing at a time and work on that, then move on to the next and so on ad infinitum. There really is no shortcut for playing experience and posting hands, reading books etc. What wins is patience, perseverance, level-headedness and an enduring desire to punish mistakes.

I really am not a believer in going over hand histories in quantity. A key skill everyone must learn is precision in thinking, you must learn to identify hands that you have a problem with. These are betrayed by a sense of uncertainty, but not of the outcome, but of the course of action. Increeasingly I am able to make a play and look away from the table even at SD knowing the play was correct, the outcome is almost irrelevant. I guess when I get good enough to do this on most hands, I will be able to comfortably 4-table and stop looking at how many chips I have.

You are not playing perfect, after 7K I would say you are only just beginning to understand enough to know that you are only just begining to understand... /images/graemlins/grin.gif