[Student]

Thanks for your help!

I play 1/2 cents NL HE on PokerStars, and I lose money at it. There will be a time when I make money at this game, and another when I can breakeven at $1/2 or $3/6 or something else, at which time I'll wonder about bonuses and rakeback. Then I'll make my move, so to speak! I'm staying away from Party deliberately, so I can join them and their skins in the optimum way.

Let's say I was ready to make my move. My understanding is you have to join the skins first, and then join Party itself lastly. This gives you the biggest set of opportunities to secure good bonuses. Is this your advise too?

A problem with studying Historic Hands you've played personally, especially when the only playing you've done is on the 1/2 cents tables, is that these hands will be typical of beginner play, hence scarcely a model of excellence! You're absolutely correct that hands in my personal library would include some ideal ones, perhaps even many ideal ones, but I'm too inexperienced to make the judgement. The ideal hand has every participant playing flawlessly (except as noted below), because I recommend that seeing a hand unfold, action by action, will draw attention to every decision made, for the extreme benefit of the beginner.

Ideally a person, beginner or advanced player, would submit hands he thinks are great hands for possible inclusion in the 2+2 library of great hands. An expert would review submitted hands, and would accept hands in behalf of 2+2 users, affixing to accepted hands notes of explanation. The user would learn what he can from these hands, the notes, and also his personal library of poker reference books. He'd test statements to his own satisfaction, and learn accordingly.

So it's true each of us could come up with 100 hands per day we've played personally (and many, many more if using Party, most of which we'd not be part of), but the process of sorting thru these hands to provide the optimum eventual learning experience necessitates having an expert involved at some level. Wiki would have a certain facility, in these respects, and they'd take hands they accept into their library of Historic Hands and offer them to the public. They would simultaneously urge expert players to critique these hands. After all, a hand doesn't have to be ideally correct to be an excellent learning hand; it could be an super example of a certain common leakage! What makes it a learning experience is the words that attend it, which turn it from a bunch of random actions into a reasoned display suitable for best learning.

Dave