Methods for an effective critique (long)

[poker-penguin]

The OP needs to cross post this in small stakes, if he hasn't already. This is a great post.

[gamboooool]

Hi, I'm a long time reader, just made my screen name today!

I very much agree with your post. The advice that is available on this forum is, on the whole, top notch. However, the majority of people who respond to questions do so in a variety of inappropriate ways.

While I personally couldn't care less about whether a poster is an ass or friendly when posting advice, I find the one-word-answerness that has been a mainstay of many of the "top" posters on this forum to be disheartening. Honestly, the poster Citanul, that many seem to dislike so much, doesn't bother me at all, because it seems that when he responds to a strategy post he does so with an argument presented, instead of just "fold."

This doesn't mean that I condone his tenor, but it is far from the thing I find worst around here. It's a free message board, and if people are fine pretending to be a girl, pretending to be gay, or pretending to know what they're talking about, people being "nice" doesn't matter nearly as much as their poker content.

I think that OP's post should be paired with another post, possibly one that Scuba Chuck made a while back. While it is good to have a set of guidelines to hope that people follow while responding to a post, it would be nice if the people who post hands or questions followed some kind of standards as well. I'm pretty sure that the number of hands posted without reads, without buyin information, and without other vital pieces of information far outnumber those that come with any of them these days.

If people come here to learn, and hope to do so by posting their hands and questions, they should quickly realize that it is in their best interests to post something close to the whole of their information when asking about a hand. Far too often though, it seems they post just the cards and actions, and then when they receive advice, they respond with some beligerant string of "well, but I knew that the button was a rock," or something like that. It's pretty unacceptable.

Anyway, this post has been long enough, and I hate to get long-winded. Good post Das!