Archive for December, 2006

Learning the rules of poker is actually one of my clearest early memories, and I have no idea why, because I don’t think I was especially interested at the time, and I know I promptly forgot them. But I distinctly recall sitting on the hardwood floor of a Baltimore row house as my aunt showed me how to play seven card stud, explained what hand beats what, etc. I was about six years old at the time—  This post is now posted in the Articles section, read the complete post here

Why are tournaments so profitable for a smart poker player? It’s because you are always getting a giant overlay. In a 180-man Stars tourney, for instance, you are competing against no more than 100 opponents, and quite often less. In other words, there are at most 100 other players trying to win the tournament. The rest are just trying to cash, and might as well be playing a different game altogether. These players are not competing with you for the top prizes.

In the early stages, they are playing to accumulate, just like you are. Their strategy is not intrinsically wrong, though their play may be.

In the money, most of them are happy to be there and will gamble up, and are too short to do anything else anyway. Again, their strategy is not intrinsically wrong here.

On the bubble, however, they are folding much too often and leaving a ton of money on the table. You need to put yourself in a position to scoop up as much of it as possible, as this is far and away the best opportunity you will have to accumulate chips. Here are some tips on how to do that:  Read the complete post...

Introduction

How much would you pay for a program that allowed you to see your opponents’ hole cards? Wouldn’t it be even better if you had a program that gave your opponents whatever hole cards you wanted them to have? And if you had such a program, you wouldn’t just give them all garbage so that you could steal their blinds; you would want to give them second best hands and then value bet them to death. In other words, you would want to create situations where your opponents held slightly worse hands than yours, because these are the most profitable situations in poker.

Well here’s the thing: you already have this ability. To some extent, you are in control of the cards that your opponents hold. Whenever an opponent enters the pot, he is doing so with some range of hands that is determined by the action in front of him, his position, his stack size, table conditions, his mood, etc. As the hand progresses, however, you will have the ability to narrow his range depending on the line that you take. Unfortunately, you can’t make him throw away the nuts, and in general it will be hard to get him to pitch any of the hands at the top of his range. This is why you should play your big hands fast most of the time: there is little danger of shaking Villain off of a big but slightly worse hand, which means that you are primed to win a large pot. Conversely, playing a medium strength hand too fast is generally bad because it allows Villain to throw away everything you beat and take your money when he’s got you beat.  Read the complete post...

One of my major goals for 2007 is to get my life in order. I’ve been a semi-professional poker player for about two years now, and the game has been very good to me, but it’s not what I want to do with my life. I still haven’t figured out exactly what I do want to do, but I’ve always loved writing, and recently, I’ve rediscovered that passion while writing on various poker-related subjects. I’m starting this blog to encourage myself to write more often and hopefully to share my work with a larger audience than has seen it so far.

There will probably be a flurry of posts early on as I put up material that I have largely written already. The pace will slow down as I shift to creating new content, and early on I have a modest goal of one substantive post per week. By ‘substantive’ I mean something entertaining and/or educational, not just bad beat stories or quick updates on how my week has been.

I’m very interested in comments about what’s enjoyable to read, what’s thought-provoking, what you would like to see more of, etc. Thanks for visiting, and enjoy!