I like to bring seemingly random ideas into poker. I see Replay as a lab of sorts, a place to quickly and easily try new things. The SnGs, in particular, are great for this.
So here’s how an experiment gets started…
First, you happen to see a random video on Muhammad Ali. They happen to mention that his original name was Cassius Clay. Now, that sounds a lot like “Cashes Clay,” with clay being an obvious reference to the clay used in poker chips of the period. So now “Cashes Clay” becomes , at least in my head, probably the best poker name ever.
Now yer thinking, well, how would Cashes Clay play poker the way Cassius Clay boxed?
So you simulate his footwork by sliding a little towards fancy play syndrome.
You can play a few few more suited connector stuff, and float like a butterfly. And if you hit something good, BAM, you sting like a bee.
Let’s jab more and throw more knock-out sized bets.
Might as well include some rope-a-dope when the situation demands. There’s nothing wrong with playing the big “D” now and then.
So anyway, that’s what I’ll be doing the next week or so… a tribute to Muhammad Ali.
I was inspired by another thread about playing bullies, so I decided to play as a bully for a few days to learn, first hand, what the strengths and weaknesses are. Then I saw that Ali thing and decided to try that too.
Any playing style is more or less a set of sliders. Some of them are connected. For example, the “aggression” slider is hooked to the “variance” slider. High aggro styles are high variance, so not that well suited to most tournament play. Mr. Ali is doing well in the early rounds, but eventually gets himself knocked out at some point.
I’ll do a few more fights then probably throw in the towel.
Unless he is able to switch his style to rope-a-dope against different oppos later in the tourney.
I was playing in the Hijack 7:30 pm tourney as a Late Reg last night when I got home from work at 7:35 and started out completely unable to win a pot of any kind and went below 2000 chips, so switched to stealing mode and got my stack up to about 7000 mostly with bluffs when three people would limp and then decide that they didn’t really want to play against AA or whatever I had for a large percentage of their stack (started with 5000).
The player to my right who had a stack double the size of mine (lets call him George Foreman) went all-in three or four times on my BB, from which I deduced that probably he did not have much. He lost a few large pots and then his stack was a bit smaller than mine.
On another turn in the BB, I woke up with A9 suited so called his all in, suspecting he was weak, and he turned over 2-3 suited, and beat me with a pair of 2’s, leaving me with about 1200 chips.
Something very odd happened then. Another player commented “ouf” at the outrageous bad beat, and Foreman commented “Well, he keeps taking away my Big Blind”. It seemed that this drove Foreman to lose his marbles.
If I encounter Foreman again, I shall continue to take away his blind from him as much as possible. I shall also try to take away all his chips if I pick up a decent hand.
Again I had to switch into stealing mode before I was blinded out and actually got up to as high as 2nd place shortly after the 1-hour break, while Foreman was hanging through the ropes.
I am actually starting to recognize some players who regularly play this tournament, including some who like to limp, but invariably fold when asked if they really want to see a flop. Unfortunately my wife then arrived home from work a little before 9 p.m. and I more or less threw away my stack to go and wash dishes and issue commands to the children.
