Posts Tagged ‘tilt’

Tri Nguyen just came out with a new book that has more in common with Barry Greenstein’s Ace on the River than with a strategy manual. Here’s the long and short of what I had to say about it:

How I Made My First Million From Poker is all over the map. It’s a memoir, it’s a strategy book, it’s a poker lifestyle book. This jack of all trades is a master of none, though readers who can get past Tri Nguyen’s off-putting persona are likely to find enough helpful advice to warrant a modest sticker price of $47 for paperback or e-book. All in all it’s a 6/10.

You can read the full review here. If you read the book, please let me know what you think. By the way, using my affiliate link will save you 10%, so be sure to do that if you buy it!

Edit: Fixed the flop in the Vanessa Rousso hand, I didn´t river a full house obviously.

Busted third to last hand of the night, been going back and forth a lot for the last half hour about whether I like my call, but we´ll get to that in a second. Table draw was OK but my seat was rough, had the only two truly good players at the table both on my immediate left. One of them busted the other, which I was happy about until that seat was filled by Scott Seiver. Even in position, that guy is tough to play against.

I played what I think was a very good TAG game for most of the day and hovered between 90-120% of the average. With about half an hour to go, my table broke and I moved to a much softer table which unfortunately was next on the break order.

Third table was tougher than the second but softer than the first, though again my seat wasn´t great. To my left was a kid who exuded competence and was sitting on more than twice the average. I could tell from the way the table was responding to him and talking about him that he´d been very difficult to play against.  Read the complete post...

After my other adventures on Friday night, I decided to read for a while. I’m currently working on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, but I didn’t want to exacerbate my already bad mood by immersing myself in a world of flea-ridden “soldiers” graphically scalping and getting scalped by Apaches, so I decided to start re-reading one of my all-time favorite books, David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”.

The very first essay is a reflection on the author’s experiences as a junior tennis great in downstate Illinois. In that part of the country, wind was a huge factor in the game, and Wallace attributes much of his success to his ability to deal with the concomitant frustrations more coolly than his better-prepared opponents could:  Read the complete post...

I let a guy get under my skin and tilt me tonight, which I almost never do. We were at a $2/$4 deep-stacked table, and he was just relentlessly aggressive pre-flop, both in and out of position. He was cold 4-betting me, he was 3-betting me, he was 5-betting me, etc. and always with perfect timing. Like I was getting no action on my big hands but getting re-raised constantly when I was at the middle or bottom of my range. Initially I think I was dealing with it well, but he was running well and so sucking out with whatever garbage he’d 3-bet from out of position. Then I made a stupid 6-bet all with A3s and he pretty well owned me by 5-bet-calling 99 for 250BB’s. Then we got into another big pot where he called a 4-bet from out of position with 65s, flopped a flush draw, turned a pair, got it in against my TPTK for 250 BB’s, and sucked out on the river. I swore out loud after that one, which is something I used to do a lot but that I’ve tried to stop doing in the last year.  Read the complete post...

The Wired blog yesterday reported on a recent experiment in which robots “learned” deception autonomously, without specific instructions from their programmers:

I believe I’m generally pretty good about not tilting, but for whatever reason some stuff was getting under my skin the other night. I felt like I’d been losing a lot of pots to bad luck, and though it’s hard for me to keep accurate track of how I’m doing across several tables over several hours, I felt like I was probably down a few buy-ins. What put me over the edge were these next two hands. They were played against the same player, in the same orbit, and I think they illustrate that I was already playing sub-optimally:

Full Tilt No-Limit Hold’em, $10.00 BB (6 handed) – Full-Tilt Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

MP ($985)
CO ($1946.25)
Button ($1000)
SB ($1142.55)
BB ($1154)
Hero (UTG) ($2331.75)

Preflop: Hero is UTG with Q, Q
Hero bets $40, 3 folds, SB raises to $88, 1 fold, Hero calls $48

Flop: ($186) 2, 9, 8 (2 players)
SB bets $58, Hero raises to $143, SB raises to $306, Hero calls $163

Turn: ($798) J (2 players)
SB checks, Hero checks

River: ($798) 9 (2 players)
SB checks, Hero bets $222, SB calls $222

Total pot: $1242 | Rake: $3

Results:
SB had A, A (two pair, Aces and nines).
Hero had Q, Q (two pair, Queens and nines).
Outcome: SB won $1239  Read the complete post...