Lets say you observe 3 rapid showdowns whereby a player never cbet as the initial raiser and just gave up if he didnt have a pair. This seems like a good opportunity to start picking off flops when he checks, but what if you miss a bunch of opportunities due to other action? Do you just kinda pick up right where you left off and test your theory at the next available opportunity? Or do you feel like if he hasnt been able to play the last 20 hands that he's probably looking to win his next pot and thus give him some room to fall back into his ways?
For your time I present to you trailers for Doom4 and The Division. Try to keep in mind The Division is supposed to showcasing a new real-time engine. Hard to believe this isnt CGI but there are some frame skips and other telltale signs of imperfection that make me believe it really is real-time.
oh yeah, and new trailer for Interstellar by Chris Nolan
So I finally got my hud restored and started spectating PLO tables and saw people running around 45vpip on average all the way up to 90+ and told myself "this looks fucking profitable", and it is. I'm up a bunch of buyins at NL25 hoping to move up aggressively as long as I'm not just a fish on a heater. My average stats are usually 30/23 or so which I think is pretty decent for a PLO player, so I know my results arent just due to maniacal play. But all of that is beside the point, what's really great about PLO is how deep it builds your understanding of other poker fundamentals.
For starters I have graduated into deepstacked play. I used to be terrified of playing more than 200BB's deep and even quit playing live poker for the last 6 months because I couldnt stomach big pots. All that is gone now because in PLO you end up playing 300-400BB's deep pretty quick so you have to sack up and get used to it. Whats even better is that in PLO you want to play deep. It gets deep for a reason as any PLO player knows because it is a "drawing game" or so I've heard. Draws make for big pots.
The other thing I've learned is just how desirable and down right fun value betting can be. In NLHE I've always had a slight case of MUBS or "Monsters Under the Bed Syndrome", whereby I'm paranoid of every turn/river thinking my opponent has probably sucked out on me somehow. So I make big bets and actually feel relieved when people fold instead of call. Almost satisfied really, which probably has more to do with my ego than fear sometimes. I never tap the glass, but in my head I'm always thinking "fuck you you piece of shit fish". Now they're just like warm cuddle bears that I want to snuggle with and never let go
But in PLO I find myself riding on the edge of my seat begging for calls. Why? Because in PLO you often make big hands, which puts me at a high degree of confidence. When you're flopping sets and turning flushes every other hand it's hard not to get excited about a payday, which is great for boosting confidence with your value bets. So many hands in holdem revolve around single pair scenarios that it's hard to be thrilled about getting it allin with just top pair. But in PLO it's like "oh shit I haz a boat! PLZ PLZ PLZ CALL ME!!!" Wanting calls and playing deep is like the perfect recipe for success.
And finally, I have dropped my winstop nonsense. For awhile I would set arbitrary goals like "win $100 today" and then quit no matter what once I got there. The idea was to give me something to aim for to stay focused, and to have something to feel proud about and finish each session on a high note. I knew I was leaving money on the table but it didnt matter, my mindset was so poor that I just had to win something to feel good about the session at all. Besides being counter-intuitive to general poker strategy 101, it's absolute blasphemy in PLO. So now I enjoy grinding out long sessions until the fish run dry. I often find myself the last one at the table before I quit. As long as you're not minbuying I'll play.
Anyway I know Joeingram is on some sick 20 year hustle to populate the PLO crowd for his grandkids, but it really is a good game and quite enjoyable once you learn the ropes. It's funny looking back at how I just now learn things that the rest of you have preached for 5 years.
Sure got burned for the second time utilizing one of these online video streaming rental services (google play, vudu). Rented the hobbit last night, got bored watching it, came back to finish it tonight, EXPIRED. You know what? Fuck you. Fuck you hard bitch. I tried to play fair. I tried to give you a reasonable chance not to horse fuck me. I gave you my money. I played by the rules, and this is what I got. An unreasonable time frame. Well good job MPAA, you just drove another user to 100% dedicated piracy. You had your shot, you had one of those elusive users who knows all too well how to steal your shit, but decided that because he can afford to pay that he should pay, and this is how you return the favor. You put me in a situation where undoubtedly the goal was to see if I would pay twice. I mean afterall who can only watch half a movie right? What other possible motive would there be other than to stack the deck so that the movie expires during the next logical viewing period (the same time the next day). Why wouldn't you give someone 48 hours? What do you have to lose? What advantage does this give me?
Anyway downloading HD version right now along with half a dozen other movies that were in my wish list to pay for.
The following hand accurately reflects almost every hand my opponent played for approximately 3 hours at this table. Thats right, I am going to show you just one hand, because this one hand is all you need to know how this player plays, because this is all he did all night long. This isnt a whine blog, i finished this session +300BB's. I'm just trying to figure out what the best approach is to someone like this with hands other than the nuts. I can only presume his stats would have been around 80/50/30. I'm getting a hud after this session since it would have really come in handy last night.
Submitted by : NewbSaibot
PokerStars Hand #2844108277: Holdem No Limit ($0.25/$0.50) - 2014/04/06 3:30:39
Table #7779792 6-max Seat #6 is the button
Seat 1: Small Blind ($191.73 in chips)
Seat 2: Big Blind ($43.67 in chips)
Seat 3: UTG ($42 in chips)
Seat 4: UTGplus1 ($15 in chips)
Seat 5: Hero ($67.71 in chips)
Seat 6: Dealer ($62.55 in chips)
Small Blind: posts small blind $0.25
Big Blind: posts big blind $0.50
Holecards(Odds) Dealt to Hero
UTG: folds
UTGplus1: folds
Hero: raises $1.75 to $1.75
Dealer: folds
Small Blind: raises $2.75 to $3
Big Blind: folds
Hero: raises $7.75 to $9.50
Small Blind: calls $6.50
Small Blind: checks
Hero: bets $48.46 and is all-in
Small Blind: folds
Uncalled bet ($48.46) returned to Hero
Hero: shows
Hero collected $37.05 from pot
Summary Total pot $39 | Rake $1.95
Board
Seat 1: Small Blind (small blind) mucked
Seat 2: Big Blind (big blind) mucked
Seat 3: UTG mucked
Seat 4: UTGplus1 mucked
Seat 5: Hero won ($37.05)
Seat 6: Dealer (button) mucked
I shoved because he had paid off earlier with top pair bottom kicker so I figured surely he has something here. But in general his entire playstyle was similar to the above. Just lots of nonsensical raises from out of position, floating every flop etc. I dont know if he was a maniac or just trying to pick off every single pot when he perceived weakness. Regardless, I was dealt all sorts of hands like 44, 76s, ATs, KJo, that I didnt know how to play vs him. Should I bet 3betting the ever loving shit against him? 4bet too? Or just call?
so deep, put your ass to sleep. Thats how I'm going to play from now on. I'm going to play so deep it's as if a large black male has his erect penis so deep inside you that it pinches an artery shut and your butt cheeks begin to tingle. I've been half-stacking NL25 on Bovada for awhile with success before realizing that 50BB poker is heinous and puts you in lots of weird spots where you dont know if you should ship it in or just call/fold or whatever. You cant buy in for any less, and I've been avoiding fullstack play since the games are anonymous and I didnt feel like there was much EV getting set up with coolers vs random players. Then again it's bovada and everyone is terrible so there's certainly value in playing big pots.
But the real goal is to practice for live play again. I havent played live since last november, when I folded a 2000BB pot with a set because a fish shoved on me and they always get there. Of course he had 2 pair and is just being a fish, but it rattled me nonetheless. I didnt stop playing because I lost, but because live games always end up super deep, especially live home games where there's some expectation that you stay awhile. At that moment I realized I was not prepared for deep stacked play, and thus I cant play at all since I'd have to hitrun every time I doubled up.
Well fuck that, there's just too much money in these games to avoid them due to fear. So I'm going to start playing Bovada and basically never table change unless the game breaks. NL25 is a perfect limit to simulate live play (not too retardedly fishy but certainly no talent either). The players are trying to win, just like at live NL200. They just have huge leaks. Hopefully this way not only can I break my fear of assuming the worst suckout always got there, but I can start to hone proper value betting techniques. There's still lots of 200BB stacks at NL25 on bovada which is a start.
By the way anyone hear about that Malaysian plane? Crazy shit..
So I finally got me one of them newfangled 120 hurts television sets, the kind that gives everything the "soap opera" effect as it has been coined. Holy shit this thing is wild, I spent all afternoon watching random shit on netflix upscaled to 120hz and it's sooooo weeeiiirrrddd looking. I cant tell if I like it or hate it. On one hand the picture comes in so insanely clear you can actually follow the eyelashes and pores on peoples faces as they move around on screen. But of course it also exposes flaws in the production and makes every movie set look just like, well a movie set. Suddenly the whole show is completely fake and you know you're watching a movie instead of this portal into another world. Peter Jackson and James Cameron are signing off on this saying it'll be the next big thing. Apparently the 1st Hobbit movie was filmed like this but I never saw it. Going back to "normal" movie mode of like 24fps or whatever was consistently jarring. Even movies I have already seen in their original format were suddenly jittery looking as all hell, almost as if the original was completely fucked up and needs to be recut. It's like "damn is your camera broken?" kind of filming. After about 5 minutes or so I'd get used to it again, and of course the scenery would seem much more realistic, since the missing frames kind of help blur out the details that you catch when you're running at 60fps.
The one truly fascinating thing was watching documentaries. Since documentaries are usually filmed at a slightly higher frame rate anyway, the transition simply made even an HD documentary transformed into like a SUPER HD documentary. Then it dawned on me, if they could make movies look as good as a documentary, by having the utmost in background details and realism (you know, the kind of things that already exist naturally in a documentary because it's not supposed to be staged), then movies would become like REAL FUCKIN LIFE YO!!! And I dont mean movies filmed to look like a documentary, like Cloverfield or Blair Witch or whatever. I just mean if set designers just made sure to include enough detail that the scenes literally looked exactly like they would in real life, we will be taken into the next echelon of fantasy from any filmmaker who can execute this. I just imagine the budgets would have to be even higher since you would need hundreds of people polishing each set to make it real. Which by the way is probably a failure in and of itself since it's the very act of staging a set that creates an inherit bias of falsehood. The best real set is a REAL set. Either that, or they just start filming in real locations that have already been "lived in" to create the fine detail and micro chaos necessary to make it convincing to the human eye.
Joe recently talked about the importance of goals in poker, to which I added my only little take about how I set winstops as a goal to stay focused and positive. Most people dont advocate this, but I still wanted to talk about it just because it has been helping me a lot lately.
So take a look at this giraffe eating grass:
I always have the ugliest graphs because I'm never consistent with anything and just play in my spare time. What you see happening here though are a series of trends directly correlated to my goal oriented sessions vs my freeplay sessions. Basically, at each of the spots where you notice a downward trend are days where I completely ditched my goals and started playing with no particular purpose (other than to win money). For instance switching to HU, or PLO, or normal ring games, or higher stakes. What happened was that for no particular reasons I just said "lets try something new to day", most likely out of boredom I suppose. And on each of those days, I just started clicking buttons trying to learn the game. It's understandable I might fail at foreign game types like HU or PLO, but even the ring games where I had no winstop always ended in me losing several buyins.
Every time I would finish these losing sessions tilted wondering wtf happened. There was always some degree of self-imposed jackassery involved, coupled with tilt and just bad hand selection. But I never knew why I'd suddenly begin playing like this. I still dont honestly, without any goal to look forward to I just lose track of everything I'm doing and start doing stupid shit like fancy play and so on.
The converse being every time you see an upward trend is when I went back to setting winstops. I'd say "lets hit $100 tonight, that'd be nice, that sounds doable at NL25" and just proceed from there. By the simple act of having to watch my bankroll grow another $100 I'd do everything in my power to win. You know, stuff like proper hand selection, no hero calls, no big bluffs, etc. The real kicker is, no matter how those sessions ended, I'd always leave feeling good. Most of the time I'd actually hit my goal, which would serve as excellent motivation for the next day. The times I'd lose wouldnt even phase me. I'd just shrug it off and say "cant win em all, back at it tomorrow". I'd never lose more than 4 BI's at a time so I guess I had a stoploss as well. Now you might wonder why I dont just keep going after I hit $100 & renegotiate my goal. Well that wouldnt work because I'm so fucked up I'd know I was cheating and then start playing sloppy. I really need the feeling of success at the end of the night to stay motivated to play the next day, and to stay motivated to hit my goal. If I dont have a goal in sight then the motivation drops. But just like any sport, when you are so close to victory you find yourself trying extra hard to reach the finish line. In poker this translates to even stricter attention given at the tables.
Anyway I hope to condition myself with a series of winning sessions that result in a permanent positive attitude more or less, so that I can then remove this cap I have placed on myself and rely on my experience to just win win win with no end in sight.
I've been playing off a hand chart lately to tighten up my game and have nailed down 24/18/6 stats which seems to be working well for me the last few thousand hands. Pretty much any flop I hit I smash so I like this hand range. But on a few occasions I've had direct position on a 100% vpip drooler and feel like I should be opening up my game a little, but not sure quite how much. Should I just proportionally scale up my range to around 30%? More? Or just keep doing what works, miss out on all the small/medium pots, and hope he pays me off big when I finally hit.
I'm looking for some material on how you should be thinking as a professional when it comes to making money at poker. Nothing specific about poker strategy, just the whole psychology of a successful player. Lately I've been getting super tilted playing HU vs fish, even when I'm winning. Thats right, I dont even want to play them even when I'm ahead. The other day I played a reg for over 2 hours and loved it. To me it was fun. This seems like completely backwards thinking. I should be overjoyed to play the fish reloading 5x and should hate playing regs.
I know there are a few "how to think like a winning player" type books out there, and am just looking for opinions on which to get.
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