Playing, not earning (non-hand post)

[Aaron W.]

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What made the light turn on is what I'm asking.

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I think the light came on when I realized that this game, like every other good game, is one of deep strategy. When you hear of players making 3-4 BB/100 and completely crushing the game, it's easy to think that anyone can just jump right in and do something similar. That's simply not true. Any game of this depth requires a certain amount of work to truly understand.

This made me slow down to ask all the "why" questions that I had never considered. This got me to the point of asking the right questions. Once I started asking the right questions, books like TOP and HPFAP became books to teach me how to think, and not teach me how to play. Once I learned to think poker, earning became a natural consequence.

Go through your hand history and pick a string of 10 hands from long enough ago that you don't have any true memory of it. For *EVERY* decision you make, write up a list of reasons it's a good play. Then come up with a list of reasons that another play might be good. Each list should have at least 3 reasons (5 would be better). Determine which factors are the important ones and which ones aren't so important. Compare your lists and determine if you actually made the right play. This exercise will help you begin to develop the mental categories you need to think poker. Once those categories are developed, you will be able to play better, because you will be thinking better.

(You should do the same for villain's hand if it was shown down. This will also help you learn to catch other players' mistakes, and help you learn how to profit from them.)

Good luck.

[ArturiusX]

Great post Aaron.

Discovering how flop texture can help me win pots made the biggest difference in my winrate.

[pryor15]

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The problem with bluffing at micro limits is that you're only going to get players to lay down hands that are worse than yours.

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wrong. you can push people off bottom pair, second pair, top pair bad kicker (sometimes), and very rarely even more than that. but you have to know what your opponent is willing to lay down.

someday, my son, you'll understand.

[grjr]

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2 things for me. they are both tough to explain, but i think you know it when you see it.

1. really understanding pot odds, not just learning them.

2. learning how to bluff in micro limits. it's possible, as much as you'd think now that it isn't.

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The problem with bluffing at micro limits is that you're only going to get players to lay down hands that are worse than yours. So, is that really bluffing?

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As far as Party .50/1 is concerned this is simply not true. Not only do my bluffs make me money when they work they make me money when they don't work.

Someone asked what type of player they should become. The answer was to figure out what type of player you most hated to play against and then become that type of player. Well, I hate playing against people that I have trouble figuring out what they have.

[bottomset]

honestly for me it really hasn't turned on, but I've come to accept that I'm not that good at this game and have alot of work to do, to get where I want to be

I'm confident that I can beat 2/4 down for a decent rate, and have down well sofar at 3/6 6max, but every day I play it feels like I finally figured out something I should already know

I went from 17/8 weaktight 1/2 player, to more aggro but picking spots poorly, to shorthaned play, and again a little passive, and weak turn/river play =ing too many payoffs

to finally starting to understand what my opponents are doing, and how to go about getting their money, its a slow process, and taking shots at higher limits has helped me, also not focusing on the results, but rather the decisions at hand

now i just need to play more hands

[Dieter01]

I have been on a poker break for 6 months, just starting back up again this June. To me the drive for playing was always the competitive element, and understanding that through study/practice I could get better and better. The money was just a bonus, never a driving factor (not to be confused with me being content scoring a mediocre BB/100).

Anyways... I got tired because I found myself playing 4+ tables at once, paying way to little attention to each player. I was grinding. This was boring despite the decent BB/100 I got from it. I had lost the individual challenge that I used to have with each player at the table.

Now I play one or two tables, usually of 2/4 or 3/6. BB/100 is slowly going from decent to really good. Total earnings per hour have gone down (quite a lot). The important thing though, I am fascinated by poker again. I try to guess my oppnents holding each hand. I try to calculate odds (not just pot vs making draws, but quantifying how often I think my hand will hold up, the chances of opponents holding such and such). I spend a lot of time reviewing hands, reading and lurking this forum. I was studying a bit previously as well, but I did not spend the time until the hand was resolved. Now I am getting practice making the decions "real time" so to speak, and I think that is vital to getting better.

I used to think I would get bored to death playing anything less than 4 tables. What I have found though is that its all about taking enough interest in what is going on at the table, even when I am not involved in a hand.

I suspect I will eventually increase the number of tables I play, but hopefully by then I will be so used to analyzing hands/odds/the board and betting patterns that I won't need to spend the time on each individual situation that I need to now.

[rivered_again]

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The problem with bluffing at micro limits is that you're only going to get players to lay down hands that are worse than yours.

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wrong. you can push people off bottom pair, second pair, top pair bad kicker (sometimes), and very rarely even more than that. but you have to know what your opponent is willing to lay down.

someday, my son, you'll understand.

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In my experience, bluffing in micro limits is a "win small, lose big" proposition because players at this level are not yet concerned with what YOU have, only what THEY have. If they get any piece of the flop (be it bottom pair, a marginal draw, or whatever) they are almost assured to call you down because poker is a game of luck to them and they want to see the hand through. And, since they play such a wide variety of hands, it's hard to put them on a hand to know if they will lay it down. You might get them to fold on the flop (if it misses them), but if they have their heart set on seeing if bottom pair will hold up, then the more money you contribute to a bluff, the more money you lose.

These days, the furthest I'll take a pure bluff is if I raise preflop with high unpaired cards and the flop misses me completely (like raising with AQo and the flop coming 369 rainbow), I'll bet and usually raise on the flop to represent a high pocket pair (although I doubt that they interpret it as such). If I get called or re-raised, that's the last penny I am putting into that pot. More often than not, I get called, and it's money lost to someone who is married to his bottom pair or marginal draw (and with enough opponents chasing draws, at least one of them will make theirs).

Sure, sometimes it works, because they missed the flop just as badly as you did. But that's not very often.

The way I see it, bluffing requires 2 key pieces of information: a somewhat defined range of cards your opponent is holding, and whether or not they will lay it down in a particular situation. Since players come and go pretty fast and you don't really have time to learn their playing styles, and they will play a wide variety of hands, you just don't have enough information to bluff at them intelligently.

Maybe I should start a new thread on this, as I'm sure people have other experiences and insights into this.

[tiltaholic]

Some of the things about poker that make it both so popular and so difficult to master are:

You can play very poorly and win a lot of money (MONEY!!!).
You can play very well and lose a lot of money (MONEY!!!).
This can happen either over a stretch of 1 hand, 10 hands, 100 hands, etc.
Our brain is constucted to "learn" from a natural, physical world in which "cause and effect" determines past, present, and future events.
This can reinforce or punish either bad or good play.
The gain and loss of money in particular has a profound effect on us.

So, one major step in understanding poker is to really understand this and turn it on its head. Realize you don't know everything, or what you think you know might be flawed or just outright incorrect. Getting PT is a HUGE step in this direction, because you can no longer deny your poor play and poor decisions. But PT can't bring you to the "promised land" alone -- you actually need to work at it (like anything else, and great post AW) and question your knowledge. What follows will then be dozens of little AHA!s that will all start to be incorporated into your game...for a beginning player, these moments might be the learning to dump certain starting hands (my personal demon was QJo), or to play sets and flush draws aggressively - for an intermediate player it might be learning how to isolate poor players and attack them etc...

Reading and responding to all the posts in the micro forum is an excellent start as shadow mentioned, but it needs to be coupled with a willingness to learn, question, analyze and accept.

hope that helps.