Poker Perambulation

I’m on a roll – at least with consecutive titles. Maxie is where we all are playing tournament – frustrated as all getout. She has yet to learn that part never goes away. Reading her latest show her starting to mature. I’d recommend one of my original articles to her to her about betting. It is a two parter. There’s an early blog of mine on playing AA in a non-standard manner around but I can’t find it. It was close to the start when I thought I had brilliance to share. It actually got used as a copy blog by one of the poker sites.

Some people can assign percentages to just about anything. Harrington is good at that. His last one (Grey – the workbook one) pushed that over the top. Most people don’t think that way. You seldom see the top pros burdening their listeners with percentages. It isn’t that they don’t know or understand. It is just a background item that just provides a bit of foundation.

So, when we quote this or that and say something like “On your KT hand where you went all in after flopping the 2^nd nut and rivering the nuts, I wouldn’t do that frequently because it seldom extracts max value. In early position I would likely bet half the pot or check about equal amounts. If the table was overly aggressive, I’d tend to check 22.5% more. If it was loose, I might bet just over the size of the pot 31% of the time to look like I was stealing.”, it gets weird.

That punditing got pretty stupid fast. Most of us don’t think that way in real life so why become something we ain’t at a poker table? The problem though with tournament play is that it is almost as counter intuitive as trying to bundle all those numbers into our thinking. Tournaments aren’t ‘real’ poker. That doesn’t make them less; they’re just different from what came up the Mississippi. And you can’t approach them in the same way.

Tournament structures – blind progression – dictate your tournament life. Most hand descriptions aren’t complete. Your’s are better than most but they never can or will tell the whole tale. QT is a silly hand to play whether suited or not. Yet, one can play it harder than AA at times and be right – even while losing the hand. That seems to make little sense until you relate it to the situation.

Tournaments are a lifetime. The blinds bring on premature aging or spin the clock hands faster – your pick. You start off an honest young child with little guile. But, that changes over time. Life experiences may force you into compromising your morals or taking chances for valid reasons — like making sure your kids are fed. We approach end play and are force to big bets while ignoring odds but with resounding consequences.

If you go to the area here that discusses a lot of tournament hands, you will find a huge number of suckouts. Other sites have them too. You can almost guess the horrid sequence that will happen looking at the two hands. 9 out of 10 times it is right when we note the massive suckout possible. Doyle Brunson is a top player by anyone’s standards and T2 won him the WSOP two years in a row. If you look at the play, I’m pretty sure he was behind in both. I seem to recall that in one it was hugely so.

You are doing exactly what you should be doing. You are gaining experience. The next step is to not need to apologize to yourself. If you learned something about opponents or your playing alternatives in a session, you’ve made serious progress. Unfortunately, in the tournament structure and using freerolls, you can’t really see that.

Some readers might agree with my title for this blog. They only see your losses. They are as wrong as can be. But, you may never see a real win for months and months. When that many are playing, winning is like a coin flip with a 12-sided coin. You’ll always be a dog to the odds.

So, I have a proposition for you. I will send you $22 on Stars. They have $1.10 single table SnGs. This isn’t a gift. I get half of your winnings. I believe I can back you in them and show a profit. Once you’ve made enough to buy me and the profit out and have a roll, you should – that’s smart poker. In the meantime, you can do a little addendum style post of what that roll is. My guess is you will lose about half of the $22 and then figure out how to win more than you lose. If that doesn’t happen, I will be surprised but can still supersize lunch. Deal? If so, have Linda either send me your name on PokerStars or my IM on Yahoo!

ADDENDUM:

I’ve been following Ashley Adams stuff on Pokernews. He write a lot about stud strategy. But his latest is really more generic about fear and transcends game choice.

Another of my must reads there is Tom Sexton. He has an interesting one this week

Here is a bit of it:

Tom Sexton: Bill, on that radio show you were on, that I had mentioned to you earlier at the airport, you said that one paragraph changed your life. Tell us what you were referring to on this radio show.

Bill Edler: The radio host, John Kelly, had been asking several questions, when he suddenly mentioned Doyle Brunson’s original book, Super/System: A Course In Power Poker. He had just referred to a paragraph in the book which talked about Doyle frequently putting his money in a big pot with the worst of it, appearing to be pretty lucky when he won. Doyle has this rambling gambling style, where his aggressiveness wins a lot of small pots. He then is able to get a freeroll on a big pot played, to give himself a chance to accumulate a lot of chips.

TS: Did this concept register to the degree you feel it changed your life?

Edler: Definitely! In fact, I had to re-read this section in Doyle’s book over and over again, to finally understand it. At first it didn’t make any sense to me, how I could become a winning player, with having the worst of it in many of the bigger pots. I thought maybe I’m just slow at first, until a light went off for me that opened up a whole new world in tournament poker. One should not leave dead money in the pot when you can be aggressive and win a lot of small pots, before playing that big pot.

Be sure you check it out and find out in full what they were talking about. It fits right in with my paragraph above on Doyle.

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1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.

2. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.

3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and who are very good at crossword puzzles.

4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don’t really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.

5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn’t mind running the country ”” if they could find the time ”” and if they didn’t have to leave Southern California to do it.

6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a poor job of it, thank you very much.

7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren’t too sure who’s running the country and don’t really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.

8. The New York Post is read by people who don’t care who is running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.

9. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country but need the baseball scores.

10. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren’t sure if there is a country or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feminist atheist dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy, provided of course, that they are not Republicans.

11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.

12. The Seattle Times is read by people who have recently caught a fish and need something in which to wrap it.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Journal, Tournaments. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.