Whenever I make a bad read on someone, which will happen occasionally, I get pissed off and start to really study the player and their behavior and try to figure out where I went wrong. It's my way of punishing myself for making mistakes. Basically, I want every stupid thing I do to have something good come out of it, so if I can just get a little bit of knowledge from every stupid thing I do I ...
Archives for April 2011
Best strategy for playing a limit game with a kill
Continuing from my last post, I've got another big, basic strategy mistake I see even a lot of good players make in the $15-30 fixed limit game I play in. The mistake is this: they don't adjust their strategy to the fact that it's a kill game. For those of you unfamiliar with what a kill is, here's how it works; if a player wins two pots in a row, the next hand become double the stakes (in this ...
Raising too much pre-flop against loose players in limit
The game I play most often lately is a $15-30 fixed limit Hold'em with a full kill (which makes it $30-60). The game is a very loose, aggressive game by average standards, far juicier than you'd find in an average Vegas game. There are quite a few fairly decent card players there, but even the better ones make some pretty substantial, simple mistakes. I'm going to write in this post and the next ...
A forceful bet on the river and fake aggravation
I’m going to continue to talk about “Lee”, the player I described in the last blog post. I’ll describe a $30-60 limit hand I played with him recently, and how his specific tells changed my play of the hand. So, it’s a $15-30 pot, and I’d just won the last two hands, making it a kill pot of $30-60. Lee has been playing very recklessly the last hour or so. He’s a very aggressive player; betting a ...
Pushing/throwing chips into the pot
I’m going to continue talking about betting motion tells in this post. I’m going to talk about a particular player I play with in a $15-30 limit Hold'em game. I think an analysis of his tendencies will be a really good demonstration of how you can take the more generic, basic concepts I talked about in my last post and apply them to a specific player. ...
Betting movement tells – betting forcefully vs. betting gently
I’ve been thinking a lot about betting motion tells over the past few weeks. The last few sessions I’ve played, I’ve been focusing on player hand movements—I’ve been wearing my baseball cap real low and watching people’s hands as they bet or raise. I’m going to devote this post and the following post to betting movements – in this post I’ll talk about general theory and tendencies, and in the next ...
End of online poker for Americans?
Shit has officially hit the fan for American online poker players. The screenshot to the left shows the message I get when I try to sit down at a real money table on Pokerstars today. Here's a link to a short article about Pokerstars, Full Tilt, and Absolute getting their domain names seized and being charged with bank fraud. Here's a link to the TwoPlusTwo thread about 'Black Friday' information. ...
Direct eye contact after betting and what it usually means
In the last tournament I played ($340 buy-in) there were only a few hands where physical tells and mannerisms played a significant role in how the hands went down. I'll spend a couple posts talking about some of the more interesting hands. This hand came up just a few hands before I got knocked out. We were down to the final 18 players on the final two tables. Average chip stack was 140,000. I ...
Chance at a big tournament win today
I entered this $340 buy-in event here in Portland yesterday. It was a big promotional event at this new cardroom, the Encore Club, and they had gotten Michael "The Grinder" Mizrachi and Adam "Roothlus" Levy to attract people to it. Mizrachi is a respected player with good results; Levy's a pro player sponsored by Ultimate Bet (UB), which is like the Evil Empire of the poker world. (Check out the ...