I read an article in the NY Times called 'Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue'. It was about a series of studies that showed that making decisions wears you out mentally. People who face a series of decisions will be increasingly worn out until they reach a point where they are not making their best decisions, and will effectively not care as much about the outcome of their decisions. It also ...
Most ridiculous poker hand ever televised
You will enjoy this if you haven't seen it already. It's from a Spanish televised poker tournament where one guy accidentally flips his cards up and plays heads-up against a player who flops a set. See if you can count the number of pure fundamental mistakes made by both these players. It is poker comedy at its best. No, the games aren't dead and will never be dead. ...
Great live poker advice from Limon
Limon is the twoplustwo.com handle of a high-stakes no-limit player who lives in Los Angeles. He's been playing professionally for 10 years at places like the Commerce. In 2009, he started a thread in the High Stakes NL forum with a bunch of his thoughts on the game. That thread has stayed near the top of the forum for the last two years, and Limon has continually revisited it to answer questions, ...
Immediate calls and raises, and talking a lot after betting
On the Pokerstars Big Game (season 1, week 2, ep. 3) there's a hand where Daniel Negreanu has the nut straight on the turn, and the millionaire/amateur poker player Jason Calacanis turns a set and fills up on the river. Calacanis shows some common tells. For one, he's super-talkative with a big hand. Also important are his immediate calls and bets, which give away a lot of info. ...
New poker tells book almost done
The book is getting close to being done. It’s working title is currently ‘Reading Poker Tells’. Maybe I’ll throw on a secondary subtitle; something like, "and other psychological tools". I’ve sent out the current version of the manuscript to several poker friends for comments, and I’m awaiting their reviews. The main thing I want to do is to communicate the concepts in a simple, easy-to-understand ...
Plugging a no-limit leak
I don’t usually talk about strategy too much on here, because this blog is about poker tells, not about poker strategy. There are much better blogs and forums to read about strategy in. I also don’t claim to be a great poker strategist, so consider yourself forewarned. I’m writing this for my own self-interest; to plug a leak I’ve been noticing in my no-limit game. I’ve noticed that when I’m ...
Bluffing and hand tension
At the last NLHE game I played ($5-10 at Parx Casino outside Phillie), there was a reliable tell that influenced one of my decisions. This one has to do with hand tension when a player was bluffing versus when he was value-betting. ...
Pre-flop looking-at-hole-cards tell
In the most recent session I played (Parx Casino $5-10 NLHE), there were a couple hands where tells came into play. In this post and the next, I’ll talk about a couple physical tells I spotted that influenced the way I played my hand. The tell in this post involves the length of time a pre-flop raiser would look at his hole cards. ...
Parx Casino $5-10 NLHE Trip Report
I got a chance to play an 8-hour $5-10 NL session at Parx Casino, outside of Philadelphia, PA. The cardroom was very nice; they have 64 tables, and the place seems well-run and is pleasant to be in. They only had one $5-10 NLHE game, but had several $2-5 games and a bunch of $1-2 games. They also had a couple $15-30 limit games going on, so the action was decent. Probably the coolest thing ...
Plugging leaks in my limit game
I played some $15-$30 limit Hold'em yesterday. Very disappointing session, as I played a couple pots just plain horribly. While I'm very happy with much of my game, there's still a Fancy-Play Syndrome tendency I've noticed in myself recently. And these fancy plays have cost me a significant amount of money. And it's even more frustrating because it's a concept I'm very familiar with, and "know", ...
“Sick Call” Kenny vs. guy with good hand
I was browsing Twoplustwo.com the other day and saw this thread about Kenny Tran. They call him "Sick Call" Kenny because there've been several televised tournaments where he's made some unbelievable "sick calls" with weak hands. This hand from an old WSOP Main Event makes you wonder about Kenny's live-read skills, though (although he could be a fantastic player, I don't know anything about ...
Some tells in a $5-10 no-limit game
I went to Spirit Mountain Casino (in Grand Ronde, Oregon) this past weekend to study the difference between no-limit tells across a range of three different stakes: $1-3, $2-5, and $5-10. I wanted to do this because I'd been working on some chapters for the book related to how tells differ across stakes and between limit and no-limit. I'll tell you a few interesting observations I made on the ...
Phil Galfond and some great thoughts on poker
I had read the "Jman28 Well" thread on Twoplustwo.com about five years ago, then saw it was bumped just recently so I read the whole thing over again. If you don't know who Phil Galfond is, he's only one of the best players in the world. He's won millions beating up on high-stakes online cash game regulars under the screen name OMGClayAiken. His posts on Twoplustwo get highly-deserved accolades ...
Poker in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands
Sharky's Last week I was on the island of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. I couldn't find hardly anything online searching for 'St. Thomas poker'. A lot of people said that there was no place to play cards on St. Thomas; that you had to go to St. Croix to find a poker game at the casinos there. But I did find, on a nightlife-themed website, a small mention of one place advertising a ...
Online players, live players, and tell-reading ability
Live players get a bad rap from online players. You can find back-and-forth bickering from players on both sides of the aisle on a bunch of online forum threads. Online players insist live players are mostly horrible donkeys. Live players insist there’s a lot more to live poker than just pure poker skills (like live reads and social skills that increase action). Who’s right? They both are. ...
Baton Rouge poker – trip report
I was in Louisiana last week. I visited the Belle of Baton Rouge, a riverboat casino on the Mississippi River, right next to downtown Baton Rouge. This seems to be one of the only places to spread poker in the area. There's another nearby riverboat called Hollywood Casino but it doesn't have poker. There are also a few places across the river in Port Allen but none of them seemed to offer poker ...
Looking down when betting. Studying body posture.
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 ...
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 ...