Timestamps

:30 – hello & welcome
5:06 – strategy: getting paid with quads
34:47 – interview: neil blumenfield

Strategy

$1/$3 NLHE $800 effective stacks

Villain opens to $15 from utg +2.
Hero is next to act holding 5c5h and calls the 15.
The button calls the 15 (stack 300 ish)
The limper calls the 15 (stack 150 ish)

flop ($59) is Kd 9d 5d
limper checks, Villain bets 45, Hero calls, everyone else folds.

turn ($149) is the 4c

Villain bets $55 into the now 149. Hero raises to $150 total and villain calls

River ($450) 5s. Villain checks. Hero?

For me my biggest problem was that I was always playing 9-12 tables. Because of this, I was making a lot of money but never really working on my game and improving. I think this is a problem that many mid stakes players struggle with as to improve and move up they most likely will need to sacrifice a little bit in the short run in order to progress as a player. I also found that playing heads up greatly improved my hand reading skills along with improving my game in blind battles and when playing OOP. Most of my success at the 5/10 – 25/50 level has come when I was playing 1-5 tables and truly concentrating on every hand instead of just going through the motions.

I often encourage students who come to me for 6-max or full ring coaching to try playing some Heads Up, particularly if they struggle with hand reading and thinking outside of the box.

This bit of advice, on the other hand, is either dated or just plain impractical:

I think when playing HU game selection is so key. Early on when I was putting up a huge winrate at HU I game selected religiously and for the most part just destroyed fish. Once you get into playing other good regulars you’re just looking at a variance nightmare which can often take tens of thousands of hands to iron out. I’d say for the most part just try to concentrate on playing fish or exploitable weaker regulars and you can maintain an extremely high winrate with relatively little variance but if you decide to play other good players expect 20-30 buy-in downswings semi regularly and a much lower winrate

Yes, it would be nice to play heads up all day long with fish at 5/10, but they just aren’t that easy to find. If you aren’t willing to play some decent regulars, it’s hard to find any action at all.

Overall a pretty good and interesting interview, though!