Now through the end of 2018, I’m offering 25% off custom strategy videos when you purchase two hours or more. That’s two hours for just $150!

Get the most out of your poker study time with a poker strategy videos custom-tailored to your needs. If you play online, I can review a database or hand history for you, identify your specific leaks, and suggest study material to help you plug them. Even if you don’t play online, I can review hand histories from live play, answer your questions thoroughly, and help you focus your independent study on the most important topics for your improvement.

You can find more details and a full-length sample video at https://www.thinkingpoker.net/coaching/poker-coaching-programs/custom-video-review/. To purchase your videos, comment here or email andrew at thinkingpoker dot net.

Get the most out of your poker study time with a poker strategy videos custom-tailored to your needs. If you play online, I can review a database or hand history for you, identify your specific leaks, and suggest study material to help you plug them. Even if you don’t play online, I can review hand histories from live play, answer your questions thoroughly, and help you focus your independent study on the most important topics for your improvement.

You can find more details and a full-length sample video at https://www.thinkingpoker.net/coaching/poker-coaching-programs/custom-video-review/. To purchase your videos, comment here or email andrew at thinkingpoker dot net.

My new Fundamentals of Game Theory course is a series of lessons to introduce you, step by step, to fundamental game theory concepts and help you apply them to real world poker situations. This course is not about trying to memorize and implement solver solutions in your actual play; it’s about studying solutions in order to learn the core principles of optimal play, so that you can recognize and exploit opponents who play sub-optimally.

There’s no predefined starting point. I’ve created a series of scaffolded lessons that start from zero and build up to analyzing a full solver solution for a common flop situation. Where we start in that progression will depend on how comfortable you already are game theoretical concepts.

Every session is built around a toy game or scenario that you’ll attempt to analyze and interpret for yourself and then discuss with me over Skype. All lessons can be completed with any GTO solver, though I’m best prepared to help you with either CREV or Pio. The first few lessons can even be completed with the free version of PioSolver.

For questions, more information, or to sign up, please comment here or write andrew (at) thinkingpoker (dot) net.

Get the most out of your poker study time with a poker strategy videos custom-tailored to your needs. If you play online, I can review a database or hand history for you, identify your specific leaks, and suggest study material to help you plug them. Even if you don’t play online, I can review hand histories from live play, answer your questions thoroughly, and help you focus your independent study on the most important topics for your improvement.

You can find more details and a full-length sample video at https://www.thinkingpoker.net/coaching/poker-coaching-programs/custom-video-review/. To purchase your videos, comment here or email andrew at thinkingpoker dot net.

Many of you are familiar with my videos on Tournament Poker Edge. Video training sites like TPE offer a tremendous amount of knowledge for a very low price, and I’ve been a member of many over the course of my career.

The real barrier to learning everything you need to know from subscription-based sites isn’t cost, it’s time. There are so many great videos out there that it’s hard to know which ones will best meet your needs, and it’s a real bummer to spend your valuable time watching one that doesn’t address your needs or is just plain bad.

These personalized videos offer the best of both worlds. Like subscription-based sites, they’re a lot cheaper than one-on-one coaching, but they’re a far more efficient use of your time because they are tailored specifically to your needs.

To learn more or to commission a personalized video, please visit https://www.thinkingpoker.net/coaching/poker-coaching-programs/custom-video-review/.

Here’s a full-length sample of what I can offer. It’s an actual video that I created for one of my students. Whether or not you have any interest in commissioning a video for yourself, I hope you’ll find it valuable!

Each program includes comprehensive worksheets to test your understanding of key concepts from the videos and your ability to apply them in new contexts. There’s plenty for you to work on in between sessions, and we meet only when you’ve made what progress you can independently. Then, you get targeted feedback from me about how well you’re understanding and using your new skills, plus specific advice about what to study next.

The Crushing Live Cash Games program is designed primarily for players struggling to beat the $2/$5 no-limit level and move up to $5/$10, though there’s room to adapt it for people who play higher or lower. It costs $1000 – the price for five hours of custom coaching – and includes seven hours of coaching, three months’ access to my Tournament Poker Edge videos, and a syllabus to guide your independent study between sessions and after the package is complete.

The Dominate Donkaments program is designed primarily for online tournament players, though there’s room to adapt it for those who play live tournaments. As with the other program, sessions are built around specific skills, but these skills are addressed in the context of hand history review from your tournaments. It costs $900 – the price for four and a half hours of custom coaching – and includes six hours of coaching, three months’ access to my Tournament Poker Edge videos, and a syllabus to guide your independent study between sessions and after the package is complete.

I don’t have a lot of recent online cash game experience, and I’m not generally offering coaching for online cash game players right now. If there’s a specific reason why you think I’d be a coach for you anyway, feel free to contact me and we can discuss it further.

If these sound appealing to you, you can follow the links above for more information or to sign up. If you want a better idea of what coaching with me would be like, Andre Coimbra posted some videos of our sessions on YouTube. In addition to being highly educational in their own right, they’re a good example of what you can expect.

Hero has a pretty good hand, as long as no one shows much interest in the pot. It is definitely not good enough to 3-bet and probably not even to call a raise. Hero’s options are either betting for kind of thin value and folding to a raise or bluff-catching.

It’s difficult for Hero to represent a bluff here, because this board smacks his range for calling a relatively large 3-bet out of position pretty. There are a lot of combos of trips and full houses in Hero’s range, and when he doesn’t have those he probably has some showdown value against the range he might hope to bluff Villain off of – I’m thinking here of KQ or JJ. Even if Hero turns decent pairs like 99 and 88 into bluffs, his range for firing turn and river is pretty strong, and Villain really shouldn’t do a lot of bluff-catching. Assuming Villain checks back some full houses on the flop, he can probably even folk AK to multiple bets.

This makes it hard for Hero to extract much value by betting. If you’re going to bet the turn, I agree with those who advocate small bets of 1/3 to 1/2 the pot on turn and river, with the intention of folding to a raise.

I’m a little more optimistic about bluff-catching than some commenters. Hero’s tentative read is that Villain has a wide 3-betting range, so he should be seeing the flop with a lot more air than Hero. Given the strength of Hero’s pre-flop call, I definitely don’t think Villain is betting anywhere near 100% of his whiffs on the flop. Among other things, it’s a good spot for a delayed c-bet precisely because he will also be checking some full houses and some pretty good trips and pairs.

Basically I see two big advantages and one small one to a turn check:

1. Induce bluffs, which will often include multiple big barrels.

2. Induce lighter river calls if Villain checks again. Villain is going to be conscious of defining his hand as probably-not-the-nuts after two checks, and he’ll probably be willing to call a big river bet after doing so. I can see Hero getting nearly as much value with a river bomb as with two small bets, so I don’t think he loses terribly much, if anything, from Villain’s bluff-catchers relative to a bet-bet line.

3. The smaller advantage is that it strengthens Hero’s check-check range. It’s hard to check strong hands multiple times, so when I think it’s close I like to err on the side of doing so just to strengthen that range and make myself more unpredictable. One potential upside of this is that Hero may occasionally get Villain to value bet worse on two streets.

Results

PokerStars – $2 NL FAST (6 max) – Holdem – 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4: http://www.pokertracker.com

BTN: 103 BB (VPIP: 21.02, PFR: 18.47, 3Bet Preflop: 11.43, Hands: 161)
SB: 100 BB (VPIP: 20.21, PFR: 15.96, 3Bet Preflop: 6.41, Hands: 191)
BB: 93.5 BB
UTG: 27.39 BB (VPIP: 48.00, PFR: 20.00, 3Bet Preflop: 17.65, Hands: 25)
MP: 107.66 BB (VPIP: 26.15, PFR: 24.62, 3Bet Preflop: 3.70, Hands: 69)
Hero (CO): 271.68 BB

SB posts SB 0.5 BB, BB posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 1.5 BB) Hero has Tc Td
fold, fold, Hero raises to 2 BB, BTN raises to 7 BB, fold, fold, Hero calls 5 BB

Flop : (15.5 BB, 2 players) Ah Ad Qh
Hero checks, BTN checks

Turn : (15.5 BB, 2 players) Th
Hero checks, BTN bets 11 BB, Hero calls 11 BB

River : (37.5 BB, 2 players) 8h
Hero checks, BTN bets 26 BB, Hero calls 26 BB

BTN shows Ac Qs (Full House, Aces full of Queens) (Pre 43%, Flop 100%, Turn 98%)
Hero mucks Tc Td (Full House, Tens full of Aces) (Pre 57%, Flop 0%, Turn 2%)
BTN wins 88.1 BB

The seminar will be conducted over Skype on Wednesday, May 15th from 9PM – 11PM Eastern time. Cost is $150/person, and registration is capped at five participants. To participate, you’ll need a Skype account (free), a microphone, and headphones!

A combination of slide show presentation and interactive hand discussion will cover subjects such as:

• Designing broad strategies for each phase of the tournament;
• Assessing a new table;
• Survival and playing conservatively;
• Dealing with amateurs
• Dealing with world-class players;
• Managing table image;
• Nutrition, hydration, and urination strategies;
• And more!

The 2013 series will be my eighth World Series of Poker main event. I’ve cashed five times in the Main Event, with three finishes in the top 100 and gross winnings of over $500,000.

To register, please e-mail andrew@thinkingpoker.net with subject line “WSOP Seminar”. If you have questions or ideas for future seminars, please leave them in the comments section below. Also if you’re interested in the seminar but can’t make it on Wednesday, please let me know what times would be better for you – depending on the level of interest I may schedule another of these.

This is nearly two hours of free strategy content! If you find it helpful, you can find many more of my poker strategy videos on Tournament Poker Edge, and you can even procure some one-on-one coaching for yourself!

I’ll also add that this video (and many of my coaching sessions) was made with the help of two free and very useful programs. I replayed Andre’s hand history in Universal Replayer and shared my screen with him using join.me.

The program is designed for no-limit hold ’em players currently playing at the $1/$2 or $2/$5 level who would like to improve their win-rates and/or move up to bigger games. If you’re already successful at $5/$10 or above, I may be able to help you as well, but we should talk about at first, so email me and then we’ll go from there.

For $900, ordinarily the cost of six hours of coaching, you get seven hours of one-on-one coaching plus some other valuable goodies:

• Free! Diagnostic (1 hour): We begin with a detailed analysis of the game(s) in which you play regularly to determine who plays there, how do they play, who gives you the most trouble, and who makes the biggest mistakes. The session concludes with a discussion of commonly encountered situations designed to assess how you currently think about the game and where you have the most room for improvement.
• Hand Reading (2 hours): Practice my simple but effective hand reading technique and tailor it to the players in your game. Poker is easy when you know what your opponents have!
• Maximizing Value (2 hours): Improve your winrate by raking bigger pots when you have the best hand. Learn how to build big pots when you have the nuts and squeeze extra bets out of thin value hands.
• Attacking Weakness (2 hours): Bluffing is an underappreciated tool in loose games. Contrary to popular wisdom, big bluffs can be extremely profitable in these games. Learn how to analyze your opponents’ mannerisms and betting patterns for weakness and how to push them out of the pot.
• Free! Video Integration: The Crushing Live Cash Games course builds on material presented in my Tournament Poker Edge videos. You get three months of free access to those videos, enabling our sessions to be tightly focused on how to adapt and apply these skills in the games you play.
• Free! Independent Study: After each session, you’ll receive a list of recommended reading, viewing, and exercises to expand your knowledge of the content, apply it at the tables, and prepare for the next session.

If you’d like to sign up or discuss the program and your particular needs further, please get in touch!

Oh and if you’re a tournament player, there’s a discount for you too.

• Designing a broad strategy for the day;
• Assessing a new table;
• Survival and playing conservatively;
• Dealing with amateurs
• Dealing with world-class players;
• Managing table image;
• Nutrition, hydration, and urination strategies;
• And more!

The 2012 tournament will be my seventh World Series of Poker main event. I’ve cashed 5 times in the past 6 years, with 3 finishes in the top 100 and gross winnings of over $500,000. This tournament is truly unique among poker events, and I have a lot of thoughts to share about how to approach it successfully.

Cost is $150/person, and registration is capped at five participants. The seminar will be conducted over Skype, so you’ll need only a Skype account, a microphone, and headphones to participate!

To register, please e-mail andrew@thinkingpoker.net with subject line “WSOP Main Event”. If you have questions or ideas for future seminars, please leave them in the comments section below.

These seminars are pre-scheduled, small-group discussions focused on the most common mistakes and skills gaps that I see in my NLHE tournament students. Each two-hour seminar costs $150 per person and is capped at five participants, to enable individualized attention and opportunities for everyone to ask questions and participate in discussions. The content is prepared and the discussion facilitated by me- it’s like an interactive poker video! Best of all, this is my second time offering a seminar on this topic, meaning that the material has been revised and refined with experience and feedback from past participants.

Please note this is an Intermediate to Advanced seminar. In other words, even relatively advanced players will benefit from this unique take on how to think about extracting value, but the pacing will be such that intermediate players can follow along comfortably. We will assume that you’re comfortable visualizing both your own and other players’ ranges and thinking about how your actions will influence those ranges. The seminar will help you practice and refine these techniques, providing mental shortcuts and a thorough process for determining the most profitable way to play strong hands in a variety of contexts.

To register, please e-mail andrew@thinkingpoker.net with subject line “Maximizing Value”. If you have questions, please post them here, as others may be wondering the same things. And if you have suggestions for future seminar topics, please post them here as well!

Thinking Poker Tournament Seminars are pre-scheduled, small-group discussions focused on the most common mistakes and skills gaps that I see in my NLHE tournament students. Each two-hour seminar costs $150 per person and is capped at five participants, to enable individualized attention and opportunities for everyone to ask questions and participate in discussions. The content is prepared and the discussion facilitated by me- it’s like an interactive poker video!

Hand reading is what separates mediocre and great post-flop play. It’s what enables you to extract an extra bet when you’re ahead, save a (usually large) bet when you’re beat, and pick off bluffs with weak hands that lesser players would fold without thinking twice. It’s the way great players accumulate chips in the early stages of a tournament when they aren’t getting slapped in the face with the deck.

To register, please e-mail andrew (at) thinkingpoker (dot) net with subject line “Hand Reading Seminar”. If you have questions, please post them here, as others may be wondering the same things. Also please leave a comment if there’s a topic you’re interested in or a time that would be better for you- there’s plenty of flexibility to accommodate everyone, I just need to know what you want to see!

I got an IM yesterday from a student who’s worked with me for a few months. He is originally from Paris, and though he now lives in Manhattan, he played this hand at a French casino while visiting his mother for the holidays. It couldn’t be a better example of what I’m trying to help my students achieve, and I am really proud both of this student and of the progress he has made:

[12/22/2011 8:38:16 PM] Student: dedicated a call to you tonight!
[12/22/2011 8:38:44 PM] Foucault: i’m intrigued
[12/22/2011 8:39:02 PM] Student: haha, ok, 6max french tournament.
[12/22/2011 8:39:24 PM] Student: 400/800/75
[12/22/2011 8:39:29 PM] Student: i have 36k
[12/22/2011 8:39:40 PM] Student: huge stack to my right has around 70k
[12/22/2011 8:40:22 PM] Student: the previous hand was me and him BvB and I shoved on his cbet with an open ender. he folded very frustrated saying “next time you’re getting called.”
[12/22/2011 8:40:32 PM] Student: type of guy who if things don’t go his way, you’re a bad player.
[12/22/2011 8:40:49 PM] Student: so the following hand he opens to 2400 in the CO and I have A8ss in the btn.
[12/22/2011 8:41:08 PM] Student: pretty sure that a 3bet would get be very little respect and woudl lack fold euiqty, i decided to flat.
[12/22/2011 8:41:15 PM] Student: flop comes K5K
[12/22/2011 8:41:27 PM] Student: and he bets 1400 into 6000
[12/22/2011 8:42:14 PM] Student: his range in the co is too wide to put him on a K right away but I don’t think raising him here is going to achieve much.
[12/22/2011 8:42:30 PM] Student: and i’m getting obv getting a good price so I peel one.
[12/22/2011 8:42:39 PM] Student: turn a 7d
[12/22/2011 8:43:09 PM] Student: he now bets around 8500 into 9k.
[12/22/2011 8:43:44 PM] Student: i have 30k behind roughly and start to think about his line and how it doesn’t make sense for him to do this with a K.
[12/22/2011 8:44:23 PM] Student: the small bet on flop and huge bet on turn seems fishy so I decide to call assuming i’m good and ready to call or check back a lot of rivers.
[12/22/2011 8:44:52 PM] Student: river 10h and he shoves.
[12/22/2011 8:45:15 PM] Student: i tanked for about 5 mins. eventually deciding that he either had a full house/AK or air.
[12/22/2011 8:45:57 PM] Student: I think he checks all his PP, all his 10 (J10, Q10..etc…)
[12/22/2011 8:46:10 PM] Student: obviously values his K10 but i don’t think that big.
[12/22/2011 8:46:28 PM] Student: and certainly doesn’t value a pair of 7’s or 5’s. not good enough.
[12/22/2011 8:46:53 PM] Student: So I call and he inta mucks.
[12/22/2011 8:47:04 PM] Foucault: did you show?
[12/22/2011 8:47:11 PM] Student: i did
[12/22/2011 8:47:13 PM] Foucault: you have to
[12/22/2011 8:47:14 PM] Foucault: that is so badass
[12/22/2011 8:47:21 PM] Student: i thought he was gonna kill me.
He finished 15th in the tournament after shoving A7 into AQ, which I’m sure was disappointing for him. Still, calls like these are their own reward. You can tell just from this snippet of conversation how sophisticated his thought process was and how excited he was to make the right play when it required something as courageous as calling three barrels for his whole stack with no pair. Hands like these you remember for the rest of your career.

Tres bien!

The first seminar will focus on Maximizing Value and will take place on Wednesday, November 9 from 3-5 PM Eastern (New York) time. Participants will learn when to slowplay, how to build a pot with monster hands, and how to squeeze thin value out of marginal hands. In addition to the seminar itself, all participants receive a syllabus of recommended study materials to help prepare for the session and apply newly acquired skills in their future play.

To register, please e-mail andrew(at) thinkingpoker (dot) net with subject line “Maximizing Value”. If you have questions, please post them here, as others may be wondering the same things. We’ll be updating the Coaching section of the website soon with more information about these seminars, but I wanted to get the word out about the first one right away so that you’d have time to clear your schedule!

I want to take this opportunity to address a blog post that I promised frequent commenter/home game player Kevko I would comment on quite some time ago (sorry Kev):

Then I began losing. I was blaming bad luck, other bad players, or just whatever it was that seemed to be going wrong that day. This led me to begin really studying the game. I read books and articles, forums, and even subscribed to PokerVT (Negreanu’s training site) for a while.

It seems like from that point on I have never really been able to get my game on track. In fact, the more I studied and learned, the more my results fell off. I know sooooo much more about poker now than I did then but it seems like my level of performance is deteriorating. Well maybe not deteriorating but leveling off. Is there a point where playing mathematically “correct” poker impedes your ability to get into the groove?

A lot of my students come to me with experiences like this. They feel like studying, reading, videos, and even coaching has disrupted their “natural rhythm” and now although they no more they have conflicting ideas in their heads and feel like they actually play less well.

I believe that my style of coaching is a powerful remedy to this problem. Usually what’s happened is that you’ve got a lot of information from a lot of different sources and you haven’t sorted it through it yet. Some of it could be simply wrong, but in many cases it’s a matter of not understanding the nuances that help you to figure out what is best in a given situation.

My general philosophy of coaching is to help you improve your thought processes rather than tell you how to play specific hands or situations. This means that my goal is to help you realize all of the things that you should be considering during a hand, to consider those things more quickly and effectively, and to get you in the habit of doing so consistently and instinctively. You learn how to synthesize information and think through situations in terms of strategic objectives rather than just a few new moves to your game in isolation.

Kev, I don’t mean to answer your question by saying, “Buy my coaching”. It certainly is something that you can sort through yourself. The trick is to do what I help my students to do: boil it down to concepts. Understand the purpose behind what you are doing. If a book says that you should bet in a certain situation, ask yourself why? What does that bet accomplish? Then think beyond the book and ask, “Is there a better way to accomplish that objective? What would I do in a slightly different situation? What sorts of hands are best to bet, and which hands would I rather check?”

I don’t believe that poker players have an innate style that is inevitable thrown off-kilter by learning more about the math and strategy that underlie the game. There may well be an adjustment period as you add new concepts to your game, but ultimately I think that understanding poker at a deeper level is necessarily beneficial.

Helping students to achieve this deeper understanding so that they understand what works about the way they already play and how they can enhance and improve their games is what my coaching is all about. And now, for a limited time, you can get in on it on the cheap.

These rates could go back up again at any time, so contact me right away if you’re interested!

This is especially important in one-on-one poker coaching, because it is a highly critical process. That is, I teach by criticizing, hopefully in a very constructive way, the play and thought processes of my students. Unlike my experiences teaching debate, where I was often dealing with audiences who would be the first to admit that they had virtually no prior knowledge of what I was teaching and so no pre-conceived notions to cling to or defend, when coaching poker I am dealing in a subject in which my students are already well-versed. My job is not to teach them something entirely new so much as to refine and in some cases correct things they already know or think they know.

It is difficult for anyone, no matter how open-minded and confident, to handle criticism. Even when students understand and agree with my critique of a hand, they sometimes feel the need to explain or defend themselves anyway, as if to say, “OK, yes, I see now that that is best, but I guess what I was thinking at the time was….” This is a perfectly understandable reaction and, if anything, a failing on my part.

I take my coaching very seriously, I care about the development of my students, and I believe I am always a good coach. I do my best to listen, to explain myself clearly, to answer questions patiently, and to guide without being heavy-handed. But there are a lot of good coaches out there, I’m sure.

When I am at my best, when I am offering great coaching, I am helping my students to circumvent their natural resistance to criticism and to re-thinking. I am creating an atmosphere that is conducive to open-mindedness and creativity. New ideas and information come across as eye-opening rather than threatening. Ideally, this is role I believe a coach ought to occupy, that of the guide rather than the advocate.

Get high-end coaching on a small-stakes budget with my new SSNL Group Seminar.

I’m going to be conducting a series of seminars on small-stakes 6-max NLHE that will help you shore up your fundamentals and learn to deal with the tougher competition at $1/$2 NL and above.

These small group (4 students max) sessions allow smaller stakes players to receive in-depth instruction at a fraction of the price of individual coaching.

For more information or to register, please visit my coaching page or e-mail me.

After making a video myself, I have a new appreciation for the people who do it regularly. It’s remarkably difficult to play poker, think, and talk coherently about your thinking all at the same time. Even playing just two tables, I couldn’t do it. I ended up recording the video of myself playing on four tables and then went back afterwards and added audio commentary. I’m very happy with the final result, but my voice is pretty tired from all that talking.

All in all, I’m excited to be working with the Poker Savvy folks. They’ve got some great people already on staff or as guest instructors who are both strong players and friends of mine, including Justin Rollo (Jurollo/WPTHero), Dani Stern (Ansky), and Tony Dunst (Bond18/muckthenuts). Oh and Mike Matusow. Although they’re one of the younger instructional sites, they’ve got an awesome stable and some promising ideas for new types of videos. I’m looking forward to being a part of it.

Right now, Poker Savvy is offering a 7-day free trial and waiving the usual $99 sign-up fee, so for just $25/month, you can get access to instructional videos from these two great players. I haven’t heard of the other two pros, Chris Rhodes and Evan Roberts, but I’m sure that either Ansky or Jurollo alone would be worth the monthly fee. Sorry if this comes across as shilling for them, I’m not affiliated in any way, they haven’t paid me to say this, etc. I just think it’s a very good value, especially right now that they are offering a free trial and no sign-up fee.

The site is a little tricky to navigate. Apparently this is Poker Savvy, the affiliate site, and then Poker Savvy Plus, the coaching site. Every link to PSP that I’ve found from PS, however, has taken me only to a promotional video and not to the coaching videos themselves. I already signed up, guys, you can stop selling me. Also, when I try to start a new thread in the forum, I randomly get a “Thank You For Being a Member” message and nothing else. Hopefully they’ll work that out soon.

If you do sign up, I recommend the video where Ansky plays with Joe Hachem. Joe starts kind of back-handedly berating a player who draws out on him, and then Ansky tries to provoke him further and tilt him by asking his thoughts on the hand, etc. It was pretty humorous.

They don’t have the breadth of videos that CardRunners offers, and Jurollo and Ansky aren’t quite ActionJeff and sbrugby, but it’s a strong site nonetheless. Ansky is much more open about his reads on his high stakes opposition (he’s already posted several 25/50 NL videos), something that’s missing from the few higher stakes CR videos. It’s understandable that the CR pros don’t want to share their reads on the regulars, and Ansky tells me he’s taken some crap for it already, but it’s almost pointless to talk about high stakes strategy without discussing reads.