It has been a little over four years since I started playing poker and about three years since I’ve done so online. In this time, I’ve learned and forgotten a bunch of ideas and concepts. Some things my friends and I learned/reasoned out were right, others were terrible wrong. In terms of advice, though, there is one piece that is so important I’ll never forget it…
I got to durrrr’s house around midnight when he was playing some 200/400 PLO. He was already up 600k on the day and was about to cal it a night. After he finished up his sesh, we went out to take care of some things. In the car he was telling me how soft the heads up games on Prima were. “They’re all sports betters who like gambling. Sit at 5/10, find a fish, and they never stop reloading. I’ll take half your action.” I three tabled 3/6 6 max, 5/10 full ring, and 5/10 HU. He was helping me out with the HU match as I had never played HU NL outside of SNGs.
This is when I learned that limping the button is fine. If you’re going to get called anyway, why would you want to bloat the pot with marginal hands like 45s? Limp and outplay your opponent postflop. Good advice, but not exactly epiphany-type stuff.
Though I don’t remember the exact hand, I remember the lesson it prompted. I hadn’t 3bet preflop in a while so I decided to do it with something marginal like J9o. durrrr asked me why I did that and I told him that I hadn’t 3bet in a while so I thought it would be a good time. He told me:
Always have a good reason for everything you do
Don’t 3bet for the sole reason you haven’t done so in a while. Don’t bluff raise the flop just because you haven’t done that lately. You must reason out every move you make.
Doing so will make you play more actively/not in autopilot mode. You will constantly be analyzing your play and improving. It will help prevent you from making terrible, tilty, and spewy plays because you’re not just acting on a whim, you’re consciously reasoning through your options.
Despite the great advice, I still ended up being down 4k because I lost one 200bb and two 400bb coin flips. Now owing him 2k, I decided to take a nap and .5% of his session.
I woke up a few hours later and durrrr was up 400k which covered my debt. That day, in fact, turned out to be his famous million-dollar-day. Though I broke even that day, the lesson helped me make plenty over the last 10 months. In addition to poker, this lesson can be applied to everything. It’s much harder to make a poor decision when you think through it first.
Good luck, ofishstix
Evolving (MTG)
The quality of posts in this forum has been incredibly bad recenty. So, inspired by this I thought I'd examine the stages a poster goes through, and examine the ways we can all get better.
Step 1: The Newb
The newb has just stumbled onto this site. Thye know poker basics like simple preflop hand selection and basic pot odds. The rest of poker is still a mystery, however.
Generally they enter into the forum asking a pretty simple question like "UTG with 6BBs and AKo, raise, push, or just fold it," or, "I'm in the CO with 15BBs and an MP player raises, should I just call so I can get away if an A flops." The newb comes in 3 distinct brands. There is the passive newb, the angry newb, and the interested newb. The
passive newb posts a hand to be told what to do. He (or in much rarer cases she) posts a situation so that the better posters on the forum can tell him what to do in the given situation. The angry newb posts so that he can crow about how his decision is right and berate those who disagree with him (even though it is clear to most that the angry newb is clearly a worse player than the ones he berates). Then there is the interested newb who is much rarer than the other 2. The interested newb posts the same type of threads, but becomes involved in debate in an attempt to understand the advice he receives.
Unlike the angry newb he doesnt assume he is right, and unlike the passive newb he is seeking to understand how to make decisions, not how to play only the hand he posted.
In order to progress further, both the angry newb and the passive newb must first transform themselves into the interested newb.
Step 2: The Confuzlleds
Generally speaking this stage occurs when a newb sticks with it. They begin reading and posting and get bombarded with concepts they are not prepared to deal with. Thus they end up making posts like "KK and 8 BBs, should I stop n go," or "Restealing with QQ."
The confuzzled understand basic strategy but get confused and puzzled by anything but the most simple of situations. You often see phrases like, "if you want to gamble then call" or, "if you want to play for first call, if you want to make the money then folding is ok." Most confuzzled players games consist of trying to apply rules they read about to situations they are confronted with, often without rhyme or reason. The majority of players stall here because again they do not make the effort to understand the thinking and reasoning that dictates these rules, (for example open pushing with roughly 10BBs), instead they just try to use them, and often incorrectly. Players games have improved from when they were newbs, but generally they remain break even players at best.
However, a small number of confuzzleds strive to understand the "rules" (they understand that "rules" should be in quotes) and the leads them to progress.
Step 3: Leapers
If a poster progresses this far they are on their way. They have made the first leap, that is, they have found math. They have grasped that the "rules" are just a shorthand way to deal with frequent situations, and that they stem from the math. Specifically they begin assigning hand ranges, and figuring out how their hand fares against those ranges. This stage usually finds posters responding to many many posts (usually authoratatively and usually correctly) because while they are helping answer the question the poster is asking they are also helping themselves become more comfortable assigning ranges and doing complicated EV calculations. If a poster makes it to this point they are more than likely a winning player which makes it oh so tempting to stall and not continue on to...
Step 4: Poker Players
If you make it here, the math has become 2nd nature (even the most complicated of it).
You main focus is no longer individual decisions but rather lines (the series of decisions you make in a hand looked at collectively). Often when responding to basic questions these posters leave out explicit calculations because it has become so second nature that they can intuit the correct action without having to do the math out (this can occasionally make them a little hard to distinguish from the cunfuzzled). By focusing on how to play the hand as a whole these posters learn how to make better postflop decisions and often it leads to them leaving the forum in favor of cash games as for the first time they may be equipped for it. A poster who reaches this level is clearly a very good tournament player (although might still be a very middle of the road cash game player) and its easy for them to think they have nothing left to learn.
Step 5: Meta
The elite. They are focused on playing poker instead of just an individual hand, or decision. They think about how to play their hand in relation to all the other hands they play. Often they have no time for the simple decisions, which sucks for the rest of the forum. Still, more than anything else this category stands as a reminder to us all that there is a level to which we can improve. No matter how good we are there's always a way to get better.
So, my advice to everybody is stop being lazy, quit being comfortable with where you are and start trying to improve your game. There are always ways to get better, and
persuing those avenues is interesting and rewarding. Its a shame that so many posters here have their games stuck in neutral because its brought the forum to a grinding halt.