Do Your Homework (Cross-Post)

[GrunchCan]

Do Your Homework


I guess one of the things I like most about the pokkar is the intellectual challenge & stimulation. Now that I've graduated college & don't have classes anymore, I'm playing & thinking more about the pokkar than I did before. One night when I was reveling in not having any more school work, as I am wont to do, it occurred to me that I should have pokkar homework.

I suppose you might think of forum contributions or actually playing to be homework, but I never saw it that way. The forums & books were the texts. The games were the classroom or, even better, the lab. The private 2+2 tables were exams. I didn't really have homework, where I would be presented with a long list of basic problems and asked to solve them.

So in my reflection, I came up with a way to do homework. I've been doing this for a while, since changing over to no-limit. It's been working great, and my game is better than it's ever been due, in part, to my homework.

Here's what I do.

Sit down at a table by myself. I might be watching football or something while I do this. Deal 10 hands out to the table. Go through as if I'm playing each hand. Decide if this hand is likely to be played or mucked, and if played, limped or raised. I imaging there are blinds and a button, there are positions, etc. So the first pair of cards I look at would be UTG cards. If they're 72o, they're mucked. If they are TT, I imagine they were raised. Set the keepers down & muck the junk. Look at the next hand. Keep or fold? Next hand... etc until we reach the button, and then finally the blinds. If I imagine that nobody has had a hand they are likely to raise, then the blinds are more likely to come along.

This is where it gets interesting. Deal a flop. Go around the table and give each hand a likely action. Before long, you will study interesting situations and interactions that you never really saw in this light before, and you’ll have unlimited time and latitude to think about them. For example, suppose you have a set vs. TPTK type confrontation. You can imagine what you would think the standard line is for each hand, but once you play the scenario out, it gives you new insights as to other ways to play the hand. Maybe the standard line isn't really best, maybe it is. But there are definitely options, and no standard line is always the right line.

You also might find new ways to think about (pot/implied/effective) odds versus the different hands the opponent is likely to have.

Anyway, it's just something I've been doing. Since I've been doing this, I've studied many situations where I thought, "huh, that's interesting. I never really thought about this hand this way before." It's hard to have these sorts of insights at the table, because you're under pressure. There's also a type of rarefied pressure when contributing to the forums and it's hard to have these insights here as well. But since I've been doing my homework, I've thought about these things more, and my game has improved.

So do your homework.

Good night.