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4 Mistakes I Saw Players Make At the WSOP

“Standard Plays”

Players actually chuckled when they saw me min raise preflop. And they rolled their eyes when I overbet bombed the turn. But I picked up pots in both those spots more than a few times.

Many folks have a set strategy for playing poker and consider themselves winners when they play their strategy against others who have a less superior strategy. This may work for them in soft games, but even in the softest game this way of playing isn’t the most profitable… and when you’re not playing most profitably, you’re making a mistake.

This phenomenon has been noted before (by Ed Miller, I believe) but there becomes a sort of “table norm” for bet sizing, especially preflop, as the time at the table unfolds. When this happens preflop raise sizing is determined more by courtesy than the eagerness to exploit. And doing something because everyone does, without thinking of if it’s the right course of action for the situation, is (while perhaps our human nature) illogical. › Continue reading

Tags: 3-betting, Exploitation Play, General, hold 'em, Macro-level, no limit, online poker, opponent modeling, Poker, statistics

I Quit Playing Online Poker To Do What?!?

That’s right. After 2 years of being a professional online poker player, I’ve thrown in the towel. To be a songwriter. Wait, what? Check it out:

Now perhaps this is just a phase… I mean we never really quit poker. As Tommy Angelo said in the foreword of his book, The Elements of Poker, “…I accidentally became a full-time professional musician for eight years. My relationship with Poker stayed strong, even though I continued to split my affections. In my life, I have obsessed for years each at scrabble, and chess, and backgammon, and gin, and through it all, there was Poker, always Poker, ready to take me back.”

So I’m sure I’ll be back. But right now I’ve got a sick obsession with making music and writing songs. And I can’t tell you how many lyrics I’ve written that have double meanings reflecting poker… e.g. “if you keep from going broke, you’ll never make any money” or “every hand, every moment, every chance you get…”

To those that wish me well on this adventure, you have my thanks. I’m sure many of the regs at 100NL on Full Tilt will be glad to see me gone! My project, The Dead Languages, is presently taking pre-orders and raising funding on Kickstarter.com.

Don’t worry about this site, though. I will still be selling and supporting my Poker Software Tools: The Destroyer HUD, The Crusher HUD, and the Flop Defense Notes. I will also still be coaching. And I will check the forum at least once a day in order to continue serving the needs of my customers.

I’ve obsessed about Poker for what seems like a very long time. I’ve seen around 1.3 million hands. Now I’m going to hang it up for a while to write pretty songs.

EDIT: There’s a pretty fantastic article written about this by the Las Vegas Weekly: http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/news/2011/may/11/high-tech-savvy/

Tags: hold 'em, Macro-level, online poker, Poker, quit

The Biggest Picture

The goal of checkers is to jump all of your opponent’s pieces until he is vanquished from the board or he cannot make a move.  The goal of euchre is to take tricks.  The goal of chess is to take the king.  Poker’s goal is to get the chips.  But there is an incredible difference between the goal of a no limit hold ‘em cash game and a chess match in this fact:  The cash game goes on forever.  In a cash game, noone sits down, wins all the chips, and wins the game – game over.  The game is always going and you simply sit down for a period of time, play, then at your leisure stand up and leave.  Reading this from your computer, you are literally 5 seconds from a poker game.  In your home town there maybe several going on at this moment.  You join a game, play, leave, repeat another time.

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Tags: discipline, General, hold 'em, Macro-level, no limit