[elysium]

hi astro

thank-you for the reply. you have always been one of the posters here whose advice i have respected the most. while just an annonymous lurker, i must have read every one of your posts, from archives to the present, studying each diligently. you astro, clark, and dynasty are the members here who first initiated me into this game and steered me away from the usual type losses we see newbies taking so often. before you, i didn't know how to post a blind.

i hope i can find some way of incorporating the possibility of an extended bad run into a winning strategy. it may not be possible. possibly, whenever the cards run badly, we may always lose. i just don't know. one things for sure, i didn't play 'bad run' poker. it caught me totally by surprise. toward the tail end of my trip, my game developed into a style played similarly by tommy and mr. sklansky; a style that i highly respected, but that i also felt took away a little of the flair and maybe even rated my opponent's possible holdings a little on the high end. i found the tough calls espoused by mason, and that i have made a cornerstone in my normal game, not quite so important as the bets saved by folding when the pot odds aren't there to give the call +ev. i think this has to do with bankroll considerations, but i don't know. those tough calls, although often -ev, often can win entire pots in subsequent hands, when your opponent doesn't bet his strong draw to foldout, and you would have done just that. i'll think long and hard before any changes are made in that area. i do think that a better balance can be achieved, but chit astro, i don't know what i'm doing when i tinker with strategy that has been given much more previous thought by better poker minds than mine. to tinker is to gamble.

my best guess is that opponent knowledge considerations are the make or break features of this game. one major stumbling block when on a bad run is that your perceptions of your opponents is slightly to moderately altered. a phantom type opponent knowlege seems to set in that finds me guessing rather than evaluating what my opponent's game style and betting action suggest. i don't know of any situations in which it actually happened, but i just think that my opponent's are more likely to be successful when running a play against me when losing. but what does that mean? for all i know, they are making no more moves against me then when i'm winning.

anyway astro, thank-you for your encouraging response. i'm sure that we'll find some of the answers to the questions posed by unusually bad runs. or maybe the bad run will just go away on its mathematical own. i know that i sure do hope so.