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Old 07-30-2005, 05:10 AM
The Dude The Dude is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2002
Location: My new favorite people to hate: Angels fans.
Posts: 582
Default Re: Discipline and read-based laydowns

Here's my advice: study and get better. Now, before you get all defensive or take this post the wrong way, let me explain.

I wrote an article that appears in June's issue of the 2+2 magazine on divorcing the need for showdown. In it I state that the ability to read hands and having confidence in that ability are key to avioding paying off bets at the end of a hand. You seem to have very rigidly placed your opponent on one of two hands, while in reality he will have some other hand a decent amount of the time. He will have T9s, KcTc, or some other random hand some percentage of the time. Rather than say "I think he's got this, so I should fold," try to say "He's got this range of hands, and considering the liklihood of each individual hand the best play in the long run is to..." When you try to be too specific on putting opponents on hands, it hurts your confidence when your opponent shows something else. In reality you don't have to be correct about their specific hand every time in order to make folding a hand correct. Your hand's potential to improve, pot size, and a few other things will give you some leeway in how often you have to be precisely correct to fold profitably.

Starting to think about ranges in hands and weighing the hands in that range is much more conducive to the type of thinking that allows you to make good laydowns than rigid "he has this specific hand" thinking.

Put more effort into learning to read hands, and run the math on some specific hands to help solidify your understanding that you don't have to be right 100% of the time to make folding correct.
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