Re: What is the key to becoming a real top player?
You have to bump up the aggression and steal blinds with position and little else. When the blinds get higher, try stealing from the cutoff and/or button when it's folded to you, regardless of your cards. And don't stop just because someone plays back at you. If you try to steal with 27o and someone reraises you, fold, but try again when you have position. You have to be persistent. I know in my case, aggression also helps me concentrate more because I'm not playing my cards, but the other players.
I am not a top player by any means, but I learned a lot by watching MLG take the top prize in the Stars Sunday tourney several months ago. He was stealing the blinds in the cutoff and it made me realize how valuable it is to make those moves.
When I qualified for the Stars Sunday tourney a few months ago, I decided to use all of the T$ to play 6-handed SnGs, where you really need to be aggressive. There were two things I learned about being the table captain:
1. Other players will play back at you with a wider range of hands when you're taking down a lot of pots. This means your good hands will pay off.
2. If you're aggressive and sometimes force players to make a decision for their entire stack, players will fear you. I did not understand this until I experienced it and thought the converse would be true. This sort of goes against #1, but it's an interesting dichotomy and a valuable one to understand.
I remember one specific hand where I raised 3xBB in the cutoff with 39o, got miniraised by the BB with QQ (he complained about my calling his raise but it wasn't big enough and gave me huge odds). I hit the flop for two pair, he went all-in, and I got paid off. After that the table was all mine.
Playing SnGs can really help because you'll get more experience fighting for blinds in a shorter period of time than you would if you play all MTTs.
Hope this helps. At the moment I'm on a bad run and I'm not sure what my problem is. But when I made the aggression change I made four FTs in a month at the $10 buy-ins @ Stars and UB and it put my BR at a nice level.
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