Re: General Philosophy
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I have only a few posts here because in my first pass through I was severely flamed for "Spewing Chips"
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Nobody here hides the fact that we're a "tough love" community of poker players. You get used to it after a while because you learn that nobody is insulting your person (at least, nobody should be), but insulting your play, which is an object completely disjoint from you.
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My overall philosophy is that poker is a game of people, information and cards and in that exact order. I will often call, or even raise, when I know I have the worst of it in order to gain information about the people at the table.
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Yes and no. It's first a game about people, but these people are playing a card game. In NL, there is a lot more emphasis on information than on the cards, but in limit this is not necessarily the case. The problem is that you have only a finite edge and a finite number of ways to win money. It doesn't matter how skilled you are at reading people and using the information gained, if you play too many hands, you're going to lose. And if you play the wrong hands, you're still going to lose. And if you play the right hands and go to far with them, you're going to lose. Beating the game of hold'em is not as easy as most people would have you believe.
Knowing how to play the cards is more than enough of an edge to beat up on these microlimit games. The use of information then augments your winrate. A basic ABC player can make something like 2.5 BB/100. An more advanced ABC player can probably make more like 3 BB/100. A player who pays attention to the table and knows how to use that information can make 3.5 BB/100 and more. But the bulk of the profit comes from playing the hands that you are dealt properly.
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If I have reasonable winning chances, I will almost always call down a new player to the river just to insure that I get a peek at his outlook and strategy (many on the board call this “Spewing chips”). The few bets I might lose are an investment in how my “enemies” operate and they pay for themselves many times over because I now have a very good feel for the player on the next hand.
When a stronger hand doesn’t play back at me, I will note that even though he won a hand, it may be possible to push him off a hand later on a “scary” board. In fact there are so many people like this I just have a shorthand notation for it now, he's a "Boardaphobic".
Winning only one hand in this manner, one that I “shouldn’t”, more than pays for the investments I made in information gathering.
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Here's where everything begins. How do you know you have "reasonable" winning chances? What are the means by which you determine this bit of information? If you're up against a new player, then you don't have information about him. That leaves you with *YOUR CARDS* as the only means by which you can measure the strength of your hand. So even in this situation, your cards come first.
If you ask any of the players around here, I'm a very strong proponent of reads. And I agree with the notion that you should sometimes look up a player. However, it is very often expensive to look up a player (especially if you're calling on multiple streets) and the cost of gaining that information is very often more than what you can win back (especially in a full ring game, where you don't have as many encounters with any specific villain compared to shorthanded play).
It is a far better skill to learn to watch players when you're not in a hand and to learn to infer styles from those hands. It doesn't cost you any money and you get roughly the same information (once you learn how to glean it from the action without always needing to see a showdown).
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