Poker Perambulation

I have a neighbor that is bipolar. It isn’t a pleasant thing for him or me; he won’t take the meds. Poker, on the other hand, can reward bipolar play in the right situations.

Craig Cunningham’s great interview with Jason Strasser bring that to the fore. Jason doesn’t truly appear to be bipolar in his poker. But, it seems built around naked aggression and he isn’t the only one with the style. And we see players at almost every table trying to emulate it. Many leave before the second blind change. You can’t push every hand and survive. Jason is bipolar because he can vary his game where his emulator lack those skills.

Strassa2 is playing big buy-in tournaments and also playing high stakes ring games. There is a gated community aspect to such play that doesn’t translate to our studio apartment buy-in events. I watch the $1000-2000 limit Omaha tables at FullTilt and play their lower rent tables. My game on their tables may or may not be as successful but the reverse also applies. It is easier to bluff on their tables where a play like that will get ridiculed on mine.

Csquared plays tournaments and ring and describes it in detail. A lot of his play is with other things on the fire – work, family, distractions galore. It is recreational poker. There are a lot of folks getting their poker fix in the same way. The quality of game will vary widely as distractions come and go.

My friend Jeanne (Doc) worked fireman’s hours – 24 on and 48 off. This gave her the free time to spend the day multi-tabling on PokerRoom and doing well at it with a smart game that pretty much had to ignore a lot of the individuality of reads in the frequency of action that entails. She doesn’t lose concentration — ever!

JBHarshaw is a contributor here. Click on search and enter that name and you’ll see over a half-dozen articles he’s contributed. He’s an old Stud player and is used to analyzing hands. He’ll see a move that doesn’t make sense better than the average player.

I tend toward a tight-aggressive game that can go tight-passive more than it should if the cards are really bad. I’ll push some hands too much and others too little. But, a lot of the time I get it right. It isn’t a great game but it is pretty solid and can get me to late play and even a final table. I have a form of tilt that I am contently fighting that can lead to mistakes – I call it my boredom tilt.

All of the above are – to varied degrees – capable of folding their top hand to a play. That variation is exploitable in both directions.

What’s the point of all this? Well, we can sit at the table with all of the above any day without the descriptions provided. You’ve people who will approach a hand in a different manner. Each of them provide you with strength and weakness that you can exploit. But each must be approached from a different angle.

Jason is either a curse or a god-send. It depends on my picking up the right cards at the right time. Of course I’m doing it at a different level and playing a different strassa2 that doesn’t have his game and isn’t involved at the same stakes.

Jeanne is going to get a lot of respect. Her tight aggressive style is hard to play back at and she’ll have more good hands against me than the average player. If I decide to challenge her play it has to be a solid hand. She will punish the top-pair with top-kicker crowd.

JB will pick up my post oak bets faster than most. The table bluffers will get more rude shocks from him than from the average Joe. He also is going to punish the top-pair players.

The question now is ‘Can we identify all those players and how long will it take to get our read?’ which is a hard task when we see a lot of different players in the lower rent games. If you watch the high limit games you see the same players. You can establish strengths and weakness.

So, we’ve looked at a few types but we also need to look at the levels of the game we’re playing. A $200-20 buy-in tournament is going to play different from a $5-.50. It is different competition and the strassa2 type player is not going to get the respect from the class of player at such events. More people will draw out against him.

Advanced moves will work against advanced players. One can vary their game more. In the low rent world, the quality of opponent is a crucial factor. The percentage of good players – even in later tournament play – will provide a different mix. So, understand what works and when. Pay a lot of attention to cards played and the position they are played from. Over time you’ll get the feel necessary for the level of game you are sitting at.

At ring play, you cannot discount the ‘nobody would be playing those to cards to hit that flop’ in any game. The lack of game at the low levels apply and at the higher levels implied odds plays will make that 46o workable in advanced play against your nice stack.

We often blame the wrong thing for our failures and the wrong thing for our success. It is great when things shift to luck-box mode and all our flops hit us. No-brainer success comes to us all at time and is to be cherished. Day-in-and-out we need to know and establish what we can make work and use the proper tools against the proper opponents. We all need a more varied game but variation for variations sake is wrong and exploitable by some of the people described.

Addendum:

PokerWorks has a lot of assets that get a short view. Look back over the blogs but more importantly look at the old articles list. Even that isn’t complete. If you see an article that was interesting do a search on the author’s name. You may find a whole series of solid articles that have been lost to quick access.

As a blogger here I have access to stats for the blogs. Included in that are the Google search terms that bring readers to my blog. In one blog I used the term “full cavity search” and that has gotten the most hits here from Google. There are usually a couple of extra words thrown in like ‘girl’ that make what the person was looking for obvious — you will need to visit Linda’s blog for pictures. I imagine this article will now get a few extra Google hits. Let me welcome those visitors and hope they find this poker blog interesting and that they will have found a new extra-curricular activity — poker or gardening.

So you think you got problems? …WINTER STORM WATCH NOW IN EFFECT FROM LATE TONIGHT THROUGH FRIDAY MORNING… THE WINTER STORM WATCH IS NOW IN EFFECT FROM LATE TONIGHT THROUGH FRIDAY MORNING. A MIXTURE OF SNOW…SLEET AND FREEZING RAIN IS EXPECTED TO DEVELOP AROUND MIDNIGHT AND CONTINUE OVERNIGHT…BEFORE CHANGING TO ALL SNOW FRIDAY MORNING AND ENDING AROUND NOON ON FRIDAY. THE MIXED PRECIPITATION WILL REDUCE EXPECTED SNOWFALL AMOUNTS. CURRENT INFORMATION SUGGESTS STORM TOTAL SNOWFALL AMOUNTS OF 4 TO 8 INCHES ARE POSSIBLE.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 30th, 2006 at 6:20 am and is filed under Journal, Poker Thoughts, Tournaments. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.