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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Freeze-up bluff tell in $30-60 Limit Hold’em hand
I had a couple interesting hands this weekend in the $15-30 game. There were only a few hands where tells played a big part in how I played. The one I'm going to tell you about involves a very common tell, but it’s not one that’s usually so obvious at fixed limit games. It’s usually one you see a lot more at no-limit. But I think that limit is the perfect training ground for learning how to ...
Review of Frank Wallace’s “Poker: A Guaranteed Income For Life”
Poker: A Guaranteed Income For Life Advanced Concepts of Poker by Frank Wallace I first read Frank Wallace's Advanced Concepts of Poker in 1999. This was when I was first getting into higher-stakes poker, setting up dealer's choice home games at my college, and trying to convince friends and random acquaintances to come over and lose some money to me. The Internet was relatively new in ...
Facial expressions of strength and weakness
Can you tell which two of these pictures belong together and which one belongs on its own? All three of these pictures are taken from three different hands in a "pro meets celebrity" poker tournament Jeremy Sisto played. All three of them were taken after Jeremy made a bet. Two of them were with hands where he was relatively sure he had the best hand. One is from a hand where his hand was ...