I don't know if many of the people who hang here are old enough to remember the book "Black Like Me" but it became decided that the only way to really understand what it is like to be black in America is to become one. So I decided that based upon similar reasoning that I'd take the personna of a "regular" to understand it more fully, especially since the main reason why I joined this and a few other training sites was to get inside the minds of these regulars and in particular familiarize myself with the 6 max culture to gain better insight on how to exploit all this.

So I decided to become one for a time. I'm one of those people that believe that you really do need to take on the personna of your opposition from time to time and this can be a very valuable experience. It's not as easy as it might sound though, at least for me, as I need to set aside my preconceived notions of certain types of plays like raising too much in late position, c-bet abuse, double and triple barrelling too much, bluffing too much in general, pushing people off weak hands too much, aggression designed to only get action from better hands, etc etc etc.

I started playing poker back in the 70s by the way and have been thinking about the game on a fairly high level ever since, I think newer players meaning only a few years experience, which comprises pretty much everyone online, has fallen prey to the desire for oversimplification. Give me 4 or 8 or 12 tables, give me some standard lines so I don't have to think too much, heck if I don't have to think at all that's even better. I think that this is the perfect description of the online poker culture these days, and although there's people looking to do more, the penchant for multitabling for the most part pretty much does this in, as poker played well is way too opponent dependant to allow for the kind of reads you need while playing in a three ring circus.

So let's get back to the chimp like me part. You might think that using the word chimp is unfair here, there are people doing really well playing this way after all. Well it feels like playing like a chimp to me, and I believe that those who play this style and do well have some real skills apart from it, hand reading skills where they can keep track of things fairly well at multiple tables, perhaps making use of stats to some degree as well, however the vast majority of chimps do not and I'd bet that they either grind out a paltry win rate or of course lose money like most players do. Anyway this isn't about looking to be profitable it's about looking to optimize, and no matter how well a player is doing we can wonder whether it's optimal and it usually isn't. You don't ever want to get to the point as a poker player where you're satisfied with your game of course.

So what was the result here? Well not unexpectedly, I found the soundness of these plays to be very opponent dependent. For instance, I can understand better how players say that the so called regulars are harder to beat, there's also categories of players where this just simply doesn't work against. You've got to understand that aggression in poker only works when your opponent plays a certain way, there are other ways he or she could play to exploit it, given that we're talking overrepresenting your hand strength money wise. In other words you're putting more money in the pot than your hand deserves, your opponent needs to fold better hands often by being intimidated, and/or needs to call with weaker hands. Of course this relates to Sklansky's fundamental theorem but he only touched on it and this has to be looked at from a more EV perspective rather than an either/or one. It's not my wish to do that here though :)

So what I ended up seeing is situations where I was getting weaker hands to fold too much by my increased betting and raising, and when these were weeded out, I was in pots with the worst of it too much. I think a lot of the time people pat themselves on the back in taking pots down and don't realize that they often times would be winning them anyway if ahead, even passing up on further equity, and when behind end up costing themselves more money than they should. Now the sad thing is that while aggression can be exploited by a good player, you're not being exploited here really, you're exploiting yourself.

Although this is a simple example, imagine yourself c-betting 100% of hands, and your opponent calling your C-bet 50% of the time. Let's say that you have a 50% chance to win the hand. This is an extreme example but it really isn't that far off from reality. So what happens here? Well your opponent is throwing away the hands that you beat, and calling with the ones that have you beaten. The sad thing is that it doesn't take a poker genius to apply the 2:1 rule and it's pretty standard theory. The problem here of course is that you're bluffing way too much. I think I c-bet 85% of the time during this experiment and I took pots down when I missed but I found the whole approach rather distasteful as players who weren't very good at all were playing far too optimally against me than I preferrred because I made it way too easy for them to do so.

I could go on describing situations where I made it too easy for my opponents to play well but really what it came down to, as I've said, is that a lot of this stuff is opponent dependant and with some players I'd want to c-bet every time, with others maybe 50% or less, and among other things it depends on how loose or tight they are but there's several other factors you want to look at as well. And although I'm picking on overdoing c-betting here that's only 1 move among many and you really need to look at each strategy and line and break it down and reason through it.

So here's my conclusions in a nutshell. People play more aggressively than optimal at 6 max generally, and they tend to make themselves too exploitable. You'll hear stuff like don't worry about it, the Average Joe isn't going to know how to exploit these things, and that may be true but if you're Above Average Joe you can punish them without a whole lot of trouble. Second, they are playing way too many tables and maybe they earn more per hour this way but there's no way in hell it doesn't dilute their play. By becoming more patterned you also become more predictable and this makes you easier to beat by a good player. I'm not advising people to stop playing a lot of tables, on the contrary, if you are making more per hour this way then all is good, for both of us actually :)

So it's back to my much more sly two tabling and while I'm still casing out the joint so to speak it's become more cased now ;)

After 3 years away from the game, I'm looking to get back into things again. To those of you who are thinking about turning pro, one of the most important things to watch out for is not to burn yourself out like I did, and especially avoiding the trap of playing way too much. There was always fish out there to catch, so that's what I did, 10+ hours a day, every day, for a couple of years. I did start taking some days off but really the grind got to me way too much and to the point where I became absolutely sick of poker but still played on. So now the plan is to insist on a lot more balance and I'm thinking about 30 hours a week sounds right, and I'm extremely confident that I'll be able to pull that off.

Of course a big part of this is playing games where you can be very comfortable with your earnings playing that much, and especially to be able to hang in there when variance starts to get you and you want to work harder to win it back. I have trained myself to think long run only and we all fall prey to the short and mid term thinking but the time away from the game has given me a better perspective as well.

To be honest, what has got me thinking about playing again has been some significant additional expenses that have come up, and the first step is to supplement my income so I can get in the black again and then build the roll so I can make the switch to full time. I really don't want to rush the jump too much although I'm not going to drag it out either.

I'm already confident that I could just jump in and play but it's all about adequate preparation this time. I started out by re-reading some of the better books in my collection and getting some new ones, and even though most books aren't worth the paper they are printed on there are some decent ones out there and even ones not so good can get you thinking about the game more. That's been the goal here, I wanted to get the juices flowing with that stuff and I have to say it worked pretty well and I feel that with a fresher perspective now I've made some real gains in strategic thinking even though that was my strong suit anyway.

I also joined Stoxpoker and Cardrunners, mostly to get familiar with the culture nowadays, and also to get into the heads more of today's players, particularly at 6 max NL. I'm seeing some good ideas out there, I'm also seeing some not so good ones, and in fact the latter probably helps your game more. Average Joe is watching the vids and wanting to use the lines he sees, I'm seeing some I want to use as well but thinking in terms of alternatives and also how to beat the lines that are given, especially since many players use them. So the whole experience has been awesome, especially the Cardrunners vids, I've watched a couple hundred already in total on both sites and it's seriously ratcheted up my poker thinking, and I'm not stopping now.

I also got Hold'em Manager recently, what a fantastic tool compared to the old Poker Trackers. I had PT1 and PT2 and they were kinda neat at first, not much good for using as a HUD, which is my main interest. I've spent a lot of time on the game analysing end of things in the past, don't do much of that now other than just staying on top of things. HM is a killer program though and I've got the HUD set up on it to tell me pretty much everything I need to know at a glance, and I have the popups and the active player window when I need it. I've only had it for about a week and I've done quite a bit of mining to the point where I've got a lot of hands already, as time goes on this will be killer.

So as far as the playing, the big challenge here is doing this without any kind of real roll, I've gotten in debt fairly heavily so it's whatever I want to put on my credit cards, and given that I want to start out real small and work my way up. So I decided to start out with just $500, can throw in more as needed, and start out at .25/.50 6 max, and work my way up from there. To start out though I'm just playing a few hands here and there,193 hands so far at 25/50 and I've made $185, mostly just spotting a fish when I'm setting up the datamine tables and then sitting to his left and relieving him of his money. I also played a few hands at full ring .50/1 NL when I first got HM, to test it out, made about $120 in a few minutes, turned out the site didn't track the hands and I never got to import them, wasn't long getting idleminer which is great. So all told my bankroll is at $806.62 up about $300 which isn't a bad gain at all for about 250 hands in total. I'm not going to wait too long to move up as I've already played 5/10 at this site very successfully in the past, however that was the past and working my way up is the better way to go instead of just jumping in there, plus I want to do it with building this little roll, maybe throwing in another $500 soon but that's about it.

So the next step is to work in more playing which I'm looking to do next week, I figure by then I'll have enough hands mined so that's not going to be much of an issue, I'll start out by playing 2 tables and then work my way up to 4. I've always played 1 or 2 as I never liked overlap but I've got a 24" monitor now which can handle all 4 with room to spare. I feel though that more than that is too many, for me anyway. So as I go I'll be looking to gradually play a little more and train a little less to the point where it's mostly playing but I feel that the training will be a nice break away from the table (videos, analysing play, forums, etc) and I want to keep that end of it a significant part of my game.

Anyway stay tuned for my progress as I'm going to post it here and there to chronicle things.

First of all my apologies to the person who asked a question in the comments, the software won't allow me to make comments, at least in that first entry. To answer your question, I've been using idleminer for Site X and as you can see I'm not saying what site it is, as I mentioned in the last post, I'm not looking to recruit better players to the room :)

So while we're on this subject, I'm watching a video from vital myth yesterday and first of all let me say that I really enjoyed his vids, I'd say that from among the players I've watched he's the closest to my own style and he shows that he thinks through situations better than most which I like to see. However I was a bit amused at his "stats are garbage" pitch.

Well he's not saying they are all garbage, he likes VPIP and PFR and I believe one more. To be fair he's not alone here, I've seen this in several other players and in general folks aren't using them a whole lot in the videos as well.

I've always been excited at the potential of really revealing the play of opponents, and HM and PT3 is a big step toward that. So needless to say I was taken a little aback by all this stuff.

I'm seeing reasoning like for many of the stats you need a large sample and therefore they can be harmful so you should just watch the action and base your decisions on that instead. So let me get this straight. You only have whatever sample, few thousand hands or whatever, and that's too small so instead you're just going to sort of watch a few hands, whatever you can playing the amount of tables you do, and consider that a better sample. Granted, there are some stats that do take a large sample to be significant, like the 4 bet stuff for instance, but this means that you still don't have a good sample and you sure as heck won't get one just by watching.

Basically what these folks are pushing is to take the basic stats they like and make all sorts of inferences from that. I see all sorts of conclusions being drawn from VPIP/PFR that may have some general validity but it's far better to look at the actual situations and in many cases you don't need that big a sample of hands to do so much more accurately.

The other thing of course is that if you only have a small sample then that's often the problem, not the fact that more detailed and specific stats are unreliable in themselves.

Now this isn't to say that we should just look at our HUD's and popups and ignore the game flow, however it's not an either/or decision and you really need to do both to play your best game. It's also not a matter of thinking session stats are better, you should also use both session and historical stats and HM allows you to toggle between them as desired. As far as opponents adjusting, well again no one said you're not going to watch, it's nice to know what the heck they are adjusting from though.

However in the end it's better I guess if people believe that they should just use VPIP, PFR, and Aggr, since you don't really want them to understand the other players at the table as well as they should including you. I will say though that Corwin does speak out against Aggr as I've been doing for years, however it does have a use as it will give you an idea of how much calling a player does versus betting which is a good thing to know at a glance, but he's right in that it's not the best stat to look at for aggression and I prefer the aggression percentage as well, although looking at both is even better, and then you really should be drilling down to see more specifics.

So the bottom line boys and girls is do what you're told and don't clutter your screen with this nonsense other than the big 3 and I and other folks who are stat heads wherever they are will thank you :)