Leaks to fix

Improving as a player is never ending story. Once you become really serious about learning and eventually mastering the game, you start reading every book you can get, searching for instructional articles on Internet (and there are plenty) and finally join some forum. While there are some bad and/or mediocre sources of information, most are ok and some are excellent. But, are you ready to absorb all that.

As a complete noob you start grasping the basics: pot odds, starting hands etc. Later you broaden your horizons with some special maneuvers in special situations, ironically ones that advanced players call 'standard'. But, did you really figured out all the fundamentals. It's nice to make a move on player and win the pot because of your superb read and good timing, but can you really write an article about how to properly play river?

And that's where I am now. During this year+ I've learned quite a lot. I know many different things about almost every possible aspect of play, but the problem is that the 'knowledge' is kinda fragmented and scattered. And I'll be honest enough to admit that beside making some top class plays and being confident in my own skill, time and time again I get surprised when I run into some article (forum post) and realize that particular topic which I don't completely understand is supposed to be 'basic'.

I personally realized two obvious leaks, that I'm trying hard to fix these days. One I already mentioned - river play. This leads to another problem - whenever I started to play at some poker room, I took some promotional free no deposit money and tried to build from there. This was usually in a form of buying-in short - typically 50BB. And, even worse, once I had 20 buy-ins for present level, i.e. 10 buy-ins for the next level, I would immediately jump into higher game with 50BB, since I had 20 half-buy-ins. So much for bankroll management. This by itself is not that bad if you want to build fast. On the other side this IS bad cause by the time the river comes you're pretty much all-in, which often holds true even for standard 100BB stacks. At this moment deep stack play is something I can only try to imagine. Quote from respected 2+2 poster: "Remember that river value bets are the best money in holdem".

Second leak is: putting opponent on RANGE, not single hand. It's surprising how many times did I read one should put his OPP on range of likely holdings and then estimate what are his chances to beat that range. And it's even more surprising how I never managed to accept this advice and add this essential tool in my repertoire. I guess we all have our blind spots. Ex. SNG, bubble, Ms low, you open-raise w/ AQs, solid lag reraises AI, you ..? If you immediately reply: call, you're most likely wrong. It is his RANGE that you must be ahead of long term, not hoping that he is out of line time and that you'll win coin flip. And his range is way ahead. Post flop tricky situations are also when estimating range is of utmost importance. Now I have a lot of research to do. Pokerstove is calling my name.

Finally got to play some hands

This week was quite overloaded. I couldn't even dream of finding some spare time to play. I guess it's quite easier when you're young and single. Cause later everything becomes much more complicated: your child (3 year old daughter in my case) asks for your attention, your wife asks for your attention, there's day job and home duties. And I can't really be an ass to put everything aside to forcefully make room for my addiction (it's tempting though). This is one of the reasons why I rarely play SNGs. In cash games you can come and go as you like. In SNG - it ain't over till it's over: if something forces you to abandon the game, even for a few minutes, you're done. In time I'll probably become hit 'n' run specialist. Btw, while writing this one paragraph I was interrupted 3 times LOL.

Tonight I got some free time and played one hour session, NL10$, 3 tables, 6-max. Oh, forgot to mention - I've played 6-max exclusively for several months now. Three weeks ago I signed up for free 5$ on Golden Riviera poker room (Prima network). Turned it into 40$ and added extra 20$ from my moneybookers account to establish a link and be able to withdraw there back. But, got some sucky cards, tilted a little and dropped to ~46$. After deciding to withdraw the rest, the problem arouse - minimal sum one can withdraw is 50$! Boy, was I mad. Tonight I had a straight mission: build BR above 50$ (which I did: 51$) and withdraw. But now I'm not sure about my previous decision. Prima low stakes players are sooo bad. Game was sooo good. You put aside the fact that this is shorthanded table, play pretty tight, get a hand, bet it strong and get paid. Even some suckouts (inevitable at crazy loose tables) couldn't make me tilt or something - every single time I had a 'hand' someone was happy to pay me off. Not to mention some crazy ridiculous moves such as: I open raise w/ QQ, one caller (short stack), flop: rags, I cbet pot-size, he thinks long and finally reraises back AllIn, I insta-call with 5-to-1 odds and his AJo gets no help. I think I'll stick there for a while.

Timing tells

This is actually a post I made on FTR forum so I'll just copy/paste it here. It is my very first article covering one of important aspects of online play. I did my best to gather, sort and elaborate various tells based on my experience playing low stakes tables. Here it is:

Timing tells

Recently I've been paying a lot more attention to timing and deciphering it's meaning. First of all, one can make a big mistake by taking it for granted: just because someone took a long time to act, doesn't mean he's weak or something - he might be busy at other tables, telephone just rang, connection problems, etc. You can only really be sure that quick action means he acted quickly. There is one more mistake, I used to be making: even if you correctly put someone on hand, say you call PFR w/ 55, flop comes 772 and you are 99.99% sure he doesn't have a 7, DON'T try to bluff him if he is bad and will stack off with overpair.

In other words knowing the player and betting patterns are far more important. This is just a little extra info.

Here are the ones I found to be relatively reliable, having in mind all above mentioned:

1) one-second-to-call = SLOWPLAYING : ex. you raise preflop OOP, got a caller, cbet and he takes a second then calls. This is really hard to define precisely, but I noticed it more than a couple of times. It is the length of his pause that is important. You get a feeling that he just took a deep breath and acted. It takes roughly about 1 second - no more, no less.

2) one-second-to-call-preflop = BIG HAND : same thing as 1) only he took the same 1 second before calling your preflop raise. This often means he has a big hand himself and was just about to raise when you did it. If you have AA and he one-second-to-calls your PFR and one-second-to-calls your cbet on a ragged flop, don't worry about slowplaying. Chances are he has a big PP and you've got him by the balls.

3) ThinkThank-Turn-MinRaise = MONSTER : you've all seen this, I'm sure. You bet, villain thinks (acts) about 2 or 3 seconds then minraises - he has a monster and is trying to extract the most without scaring you.

4) InstaCbet-into-rags = MISSED FLOP ie OVERS : I'm always suspicious when someone insta-cbets into non-ace/non-broadway flop. Often I found it to be missed flop, but BE WARNED: if the flop contains draws it is quite possible that the villain has AA and is afraid of being outdrawn so he bets quickly and is ready to go to war on flop. This one is actually not that reliable, so floating on brick turn is probably safer strategy.

5) Thinking-calling = HE'S SCARED: It's often said: "when they are thinking, they are thinking about folding". Note the difference between this and 1) one-second-to-call. In first case we had 1 second before acting and in this case we have more, usually 3 sec or more. Here's example from the hand I played: I PFR w/ AQo and got one caller (weak tight), flop: 992, I cbet 2/3 (standard) he thinks ... and calls (now I have a lots of information: he has a PP, doesn't really believe that flop helped me AND he is SCARED, that's why he took 4, 5 seconds to call), turn: 2, I fire second barrel 3/4 pot, he thinks ... thinks ... and folds. He WAS scared. It is this slightly longer pause that I rely on when deciding whether to 2nd-barrel or not.

6) I found this one in Rizen's blog:
A lot of players, when they bluff river scare cards, will insta-push all in without hesitation. I've caught lots of people bluffing this way, and against a lot of players it's pretty reliable.
So did I just an hour ago :) . Thank you Rizen for valuable insight.

7) NOT EVERYBODY IS THE SAME. I must stress it again: knowing the player and betting patterns are of utmost importance. If you notice that particular villain takes n seconds when on a draw then adjust accordingly.

Finally, this is meant to be used against bad players. Good ones are quite capable of misguiding you into wrong conclusions.

New POKER blog

Alright, since this is my first entry let me introduce myself to the audience.

SUBJECT: POKER

I've been thinking a lot about starting a blog of my own. It is meant to serve several purposes: to monitor my own progress, to share ideas and to maybe help newbies (such as myself) in a specific fashion - someone will be able to see me running through various phases, observe pitfalls as they come and figure out the rhythm of developing, what is the next to come after ... you get the idea. If anyone finds that useful, I'll be more than satisfied.

I started my poker career about year+ ago as a total noob. My idea then was to see what's it all about and maybe earn little extra $$$. But, before I even started I promised to myself to never become a gambler. Idea was simple: take free no deposit offers, try to make something with that; if I succeed - nice, if don't - I lose some time and no $$$ of my own. It took me a year to actually learn something, go through all beginner's stages (learning discipline, learning some fundamental patterns, tilt control ...) only to finish slightly better than break-even. It WAS worth it though. I've improved a lot, learnt a lot and today I really feel confident in my game - when playing against low stakes fish. Good side of this restrictive approach was that someone paid for my education and that I wasn't losing player. Bad side: I never played for 'real' money, never had 'real' money and now I have something about 200$+ in play and about 200$+ I had to cash-out, with 100$ of it about to put back into a game. These days I usually grind NL10$.