I don’t worry about being perfect. That’s too much pressure. I play better when I don’t let mistakes undo me. I can fold hands, I can lose pots. I can misread a hand, or not pay attention. I do better when I don’t make these mistakes, but I give myself permission to make them, and not get mad at myself, or the game. That’s how I can play my best game.
I don’t give myself permission to make mistakes. When I make mistakes, it’s totally without permission of any kind. I don’t get mad at myself because "getting mad at myself " has never been part of the solution to any challenge I have ever faced, on or off the table. There’s really no need to ever be mad at anybody, this should clearly include yourself.
Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other guy to die - Buddha
PS: Sorry, my agent and PR guys insist that I say some “guru” type stuff now and then as part of our branding efforts. Hey, whatever. If I’m paying them, it somehow means I have to do what they tell me.
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By the way, I am not perfect and will never be perfect. It’s not a realistic goal. It’s an imaginary thing if you think its a destination. Some choices get you headed in the right direction better than others.You can take a little step towards perfection without desiring the illusion of perfection itself.
I don’t want to clog up the whole thread with this, but if you’re interested, I’m suggesting a “creative visualization” to help you change your “controlling self image.” Our self images control us. We imagine ourselves having a fixed small number of possible responses to situations. These finite reactions are literally all we can imagine ourselves doing.
For example, say yer a single fella and you’re in a place where you catch a woman’s eye and she smiles and darts her eyes away and kinda starts playing with her hair. Now, I don’t know what your self image lets you do, but mine shows up in a Navy Fighter Pilot uniform and reminds me that’s it’s been a while since I refueled, and she seems to be waving me in for a landing. This seems perfectly reasonable to me.
So i decide to walk up, brush her hair aside, and gently kiss her on the neck. I’m not going to slink up there like some creep, time to walk boldly. One can’t be wishy-washy on final approach, but she has the paddles. If she crosses her arms to defend her personal space or turns her attention elsewhere, showing disinterest, well, time enough to alter course. If she keeps waving me in, I think kissing her on the neck will be a splendid icebreaker!
The point is, a lot of people can’t see themselves doing that. My self image gives me options, it doesn’t limit them. Your current poker self image is restricting what you can see as possible.
Eh, your creepy lounge lizard self-image aside, I think it’s more that I seem to get punished more often than not for raising.
I don’t mean by the other players, I mean the cards detect that I’ve raised, and immediately all the ones that would make my holding good drop to the bottom of the deck.
In the 100K SNGs I’ve been playing, for at least the last week or so, it’s actually unusual for someone to open preflop. There’s a ton more limping than I was seeing at 25K.
Players at this level know to fold, and (I would think) know not to limp, and yet most of them are limping way more than they’re opening (but still way less than they’re folding). I haven’t figured out what to make of this, but it seems plausible that if everyone knows to have a tight range and be disciplined about entering hands, then the need to open-raise is lessened, because players holding poor cards will fold them.
It’s weird, because when I started playing about a year ago, no one was raising at 25K stakes, either. Then one day, I ran into some player who said in chat that no one on this site knows how to play for @#$%@% and everyone limps, and it’s not real poker, yadda yadda. So it occurred to me to start raising my better cards, and pretty soon everyone was doing it. Then the tables went bingo-mania for a time, then things sorta calmed down to about how things have been lately, a mix of crazy, awful, and decent play. And at 25K, players are willing to call pretty wide, and will go in for 6-10BB pretty often, and are more likely to call shoves, too.
Up at 100K, players raise sometimes, but less than you’d expect, both in terms of frequency and size.
At first, I tried raising to fold the table, to the size I would have at 25K to hopefully get at least half of the table to fold, and I kept getting destroyed by player sleeping cards strong enough that they shoulda opened with them.
I also seem to miss the flop at about 2x the rate expected by chance when I raise, which is aggravating. I can hit flops a lot more often when I limp, for some reason. It defies logic, and I haven’t actually audited my hand history to see whether this is actually true, or something that confirmation bias leads me to perceive to be true, but based on my win rate, it sure seems like it must be true, because I’m suddenly winning a ton more.
I dunno. It’s perhaps equally possible that my postflop game is just terrible, and that I was over-aggressive trying to bluff down pots that were raised up too big for me to let go, which in turn was killing my win rate, but when I’m able to limp hands, it’s easier for me to give up on a flop when I miss it. Could that be it? Naah…
Haha, ok, now that was funny. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a creepy lounge, but if you know of any good ones in my area send me a PM! I don’t think the natural non-verbal interactions between 2 people is creepy at all, unless yer asking her if your rag smells like chloroform or something crazy. I mean, let’s face it, that would be kinda creepy.
Anyway, look, here’s something fun you can try…
Make a mental list of all the things you want to do if you open, get called, and hit the flop. Now make a list of things you want to do if you miss the flop.They should be pretty much the same, except there will be special cases like flopping a full house or catching an AKQ all spades flop and you settin there with the 6 and 7 of hearts, and so on. So OK, we can exclude all these rare occurrences.
If the lists are still different, just switch them. Now every time you hit a flop, do the stuff you would do if you missed the flop. And, when you miss, do the stuff you would do if you hit. If you do this for a week or so, you will find that one of the “things to do” lists works better whether you hit the flop or not. Now we can throw the other list away and just do the stuff on the good list.
We can skip the cards detecting stuff and all that. Sell crazy someplace else, I’m all stocked up.
Your theoretical model is wrong. Why do you think they “know to fold” if they aren’t folding? They know not to limp, but limp? One or more of your assumptions about the environment is wrong. Adjust and move on!
That would not be a good image to have unless it’s not how you’re actually playing. If you aren’t playing many hands and always show strong holdings, don’t be surprised if people call you when they have strong hands too. Slap them upside the head with a good 63o now and then to loosen them up a bit.
That, sir, is just more crazy talk.That and the “don’t need to open as much because…” If you want to limp, limp. It’s your chips. If you open and some of the limpers fold, that’s a good thing. Sometimes everyone will fold, also good. A lot of times, everyone will fold on you but the guy going all ninja on you with some secret monster. So now you know where he is and hey, all those other people left their chips in the pot.
Limping isn’t safer! Limping might get you into a 3 or 5 way pot against people who could have anything. That’s about as dangerous as it gets. Folding is sort of safe, as long as you don’t do it too much, but the next safest thing is opening.
Anyway, that’s what I think. So I’ve been sort of writing this and mostly googling “creepy lounges” just for research purposes, you understand. I guess there’s none in my area. I got a couple of hits for something described as a “sleazy lounge” though. Now I’m thinking that might be close enough for investigative purposes, so we’ll see. I don’t own a polyester suit, which seems to be the uniform of the day in the few dark blurry images I can see, but I think a nice silk blazer and smart footwear might do the trick and raise the bar a little, if I must say so myself. Thanks for the tip!
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I think one of the reasons a lot of players limp instead of raising preflop is that the blind structure is so tight, that if you raise to 3BB and get two callers, then a pot sized bet of 10 BBs on the flop will often leave you stack-committed or put a large percentage of your stack at risk, and a smaller bet will never get a small pocket pair to fold. Then again, you bluff on the flop with air or a draw and win the pot and you have inflicted a lot of damage on two opponents.
One thing I have noticed that is the same in every tournament is that no matter how many players enter, whether it be a sit’n’go or a tournament, there is only one winner at the end, and everyone else is a loser.
Once more than half the players are eliminated, we should be allowed to chop the pot and everyone could be a winner and share their winnings with those who were eliminated. That is what they would do at my daughter’s elementary school where all the students are winners. Only problem is that they don’t seem to learn very much, considering that they are all winners.
Yes, basically. That’s what I’ve been observing.
Lately, I’m finding that it feels best when I am able to raise my openings to 3-6BB, and not more than about 10% of my stack. If the amounts are thus, it’s often viable for me to close hands preflop, from position with little action ahead of me, and especially if the raise would put my potential callers more than say 30% in.
I watch when it’s more than that, because it can induce jams, which depending on the cards I have, I either want, or want to avoid.
It’s great when you can win a bunch of small pots preflop through aggressive play that is yet not putting a lot of your stack at risk. But I don’t like to over rely on it. If you raise every hand, eventually you get taken, and taking one big loss can nullify several steals.
I see some value in playing passively at times. I think betting is best when you want them to fold. When you want them to call, they often don’t. But if I act weak, often they’ll bet harder than they ever would have called, and I can get more chips out of them.
Conventional strategy is to play aggressive, and for good reason. But a naive always-on aggressive strategy doesn’t work as well as mixing things up and being unpredictable, and doing the opposite of what your opponent is expecting. Against experienced players who are comfortable with playing back against aggressive play, sometimes a different tactic will work better.
Holding a full house, I can become the weakest, most passive calling station. I can bet on my hand if I want to, obviously, but usually I find that players will bet more than they’re willing to put in for a call, because everyone knows that aggressive play is how they win.
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This is right, you just have to mix it up. I love it when I raise 3BB with 8 6o after playing very tight for a while, and everyone folds. Then you pick up AQ on the next hand with the same result, then AA on the next hand, and someone decides enough is enough and shoves on you with one of the other Aces. You eliminate them and with your now bloated stack you raise again with garbage, and the cowering opponents all fold. Then you raise again with QJ and a small stack throws in all his chips in with KK and and a King falls on the river to give you a King high straight and send him home.
Then you can go back to playing tight and let the opponents cannibalize each other as you fold from early position and they all go back to limping in like bunny rabbits.
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Blink
That right there is a man letting his big dog out to play.
I just won this game. I didn’t do great for most of the game, but kept about breakeven until the game was 4-up.
Again, when I had a hand I could open with, I just gave away more chips because every time the board would miss me. I won a hand or two here and there, my best pot coming on a straight 7-J. But I lost most of the hands I entered, although I was still slightly up. My game started turning around somewhat when I got dealt AKo, raised 3BB, missed the flop, checked, the only other player in the hand shoved the rest of his small stack, and I called because I had him covered, and I didn’t want to give up on that many chips and was ready to give up and walk away to find another table if I lost here. Pot odds were right to call. I turn a pair for my Ace, beating the small pair he had flopped, and I knocked him out of the game and was rejuvenated.
By the time it got to 4-handed, I was still around my starting stack, my cards having gone cold for several orbits, and a player across the table from me with about as many chips as me had started to shove frequently, stealing blinds. This was working for them, and their stack grew to eclipse mine. I was starting to think that I wasn’t going to be around much longer.
Then, with the table 3-up and me past the bubble, I got AA, and raised 2BB, but no one wanted to call, and I just got the blinds. I had hoped to double up this hand, but of course the raise was off putting to a blind stealer, and I guess the big stack didn’t have a hand this time.
A few hands later, I’m dealt JJ. This time, the smaller stack shoved again. With the recent pickup I was again ahead of him. Then the big stack called. Now I’m worried about my Jacks in a 3-way pot. But it’s too many chips not to play for them. Besides, I’m fairly confident that the initial shove was junk, and I’m hoping that the big stack is simply calling wide because they have about a 5:1 chip advantage.
I shove the Jacks, and the big stack calls me. We flip up, and they’re both playing weak Aces, blocking each other, and I take the hand when the board runs out with no Ace for either of them. The short stack is KO, I triple up, and suddenly have the big stack.
The next hand, I’m dealt QQ. Villain lumps, I raise 2BB, they call. Flop is kinda dry, I think about betting, but remembering that AA hand, I figure that if I check raise, I might get a lot more chips. So I check, villain shoves. I know he can’t have a straight, flush or boat, and worst case he made 2 pair or a set. But I figure if that were the case, he’d be sizing his bet for a call, which means worst case he’s got top pair, and I’m dominant. I call, he’s got 86,making middle pair, sixes, and I win the game.
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Congrats on the win. Helps to catch cards at key junctures.
My favorite part was the aggressive re-shove with jacks. I literally said out loud, “Aww, that’s adorable. Puggy’s learn-ding.” No way you make that play a year ago, or even a few months ago. Nice work.
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Week over week, I’m doing a lot better.
| Pegasus League | |
|---|---|
| Wins - losses | 10 - 13 |
| ITM% | 43% |
| Wins | 6 |
| 2nd place | 2 |
| 3rd place | 2 |
| 4th | 1 |
| 5th | 5 |
| 6th | 1 |
| 7th | 2 |
| 8th | 2 |
| 9th | 2 |
| Chips | |
|---|---|
| Entry fees | 2,300,000 |
| Winnings | 3,420,000 |
| Profit | 1,120,000 |
| Profit % | 49% |
ITM rate is down a bit, but still excellent, and my win rate is way up, and with it my profit. And I think I may have finally gotten my tilt triggers under control. The cards have been excellent to me since Tuesday, which never hurts. And my last 5 money finishes have all been 1st place.
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And here’s what Aggression gets me:
New table, 9-Max Pegasus
Hand 1: AQ. I bet pot preflop, get a caller, I hit the flop with my Ace, river two pair, there’s a K on the board, I’m worried I could be up against AK, because the way my caller, who calls all the way to the river, is just letting me bet, I get about 1000 chips.
Two hands later, I’m dealt AA, and again bet pot when it comes to me preflop, this time I get raised, and two behind the raiser call. I re-raise a half-pot sized bet, expecting that it should close the hand, and the original re-raiser drops out of the hand, while the two who called go all-in. I call. The first player flops two pair, QQJJ and knocks out the second player, and drops me down to 1000 chips.
4th hand: I give up on the game, and shove an inside straight draw in response to a 1/2 pot bet, who calls me with two rags, which hasn’t even paired anything, and am KO by a pair of twos, pair made on the river.
Here’s a hand that I badly misplayed last night.
A9s, flopping a flush draw. I made small bets and got called by one player, who held A4. The board ran out 4, A, giving me no flush, no straight, but top pair. I was worried my opponent could have the straight, but wasn’t expecting them to have two pair. They did nothing but call all the way, and I ended up throwing away most of my chips chasing a busted draw. I felt committed by my preflop raise to protect the pot, and if I didn’t make a small bet on each street, my opponent would sense weakness and make a bet that I couldn’t call based on the pot odds. The river was the worst card I could get, because it “rescued” my unmade hand, and while it wasn’t the flush I’d wanted, it was at least Aces.
I probably could have taken the hand with stronger betting on the flop, or maybe even the Turn – I doubt that a pair of fours calls a shove here, even with the inside straight draw. Instead, my weak bets gave my villain good reason to call without having a strong hand, and cost me a game.
After losing this one, I didn’t want to play anymore, tilt-shoved A3o next hand, got called, lost my stack, and went to bed.
I posted a hand on another thread just now that also featured A9 vs A4. I had the A4 and lost my whole stack shoving the flop when A9 minbetted and I was sure he would have to fold to my shove from BB where my range was infinite! But he didn’t fold.
What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. [Friedrich Nietzsche]
Well, that would have been an ideal place to have AK… I don’t think I could have made that call with just a pair backed by a 9-kicker.
Another fine example:
KQo, on the button, I’ve been sleeping a long time, suddenly come into a pot and raise, so you know I have something good. Villain calls with 87, flop comes in low, of course it does, that’s what raising does to the deck when do it. I try to bluff two streets and throw away half my stack while @#%@#)%@()(&er calls and wins with a pair of @)(#%)(& 8s.
In case it need be said, @)#%## aggression. It’s the most overrated thing ever in poker. What wins hands? Having the best cards. Limp to flops when you have strong holdings, ditch them if you don’t hit, and let them bet into you when you do.
From the bb with KQo just check your option and see a flop. You can x/f when you miss and not really lose much. If you’re going to open go much bigger to reduce spr and increase fe, something like 330-350. After betting 1/2 pot on the flop you’re lighting chips on fire when you down bet the turn to 1/4 pot and you’re telegraphing your hand. Playing face up as AK AQ AJ KQ, never AA KK QQ. You’ve been called pre by a limper and then he calls 1/2 pot on the flop you need to either give up now or really go for it. It wouldn’t be terrible to bet 40%-50% pot on the turn and shove river. Aggression is not the problem here, IMHO.
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You might be right, @dayman. Maybe my problem was insufficient aggression post-flop, or maybe my problem was raising KQ from the BB seat.
I just finished out this week, and my results are pretty great. Only played 20 games, didn’t have time to enter more, but I played those 20 very well. I slid into 2nd place on the First 20 leaderboard, and will take a nice bonus for it.
| Chips | |
|---|---|
| Entry fees | 2,000,000 |
| Winnings | 3,334,500 |
| Profit | 1,334,500 |
| Profit % | 67% |
| Wins - losses | 10 - 10 |
|---|---|
| ITM% | 50% |
| Wins | 5 |
| 2nd place | 4 |
| 3rd place | 1 |
| 4th | 3 |
| 5th | 1 |
| 6th | 1 |
| 7th | 2 |
| 8th | 1 |
| 9th | 2 |
My last game was really enjoyable.
Crazy at first. A player who I have come to regard as an idiot was at the table, they seem to win their share of games, but they seem to do it very stupidly. Basically they start out hyper-aggressive, and if they win early, they maybe win the table, but mostly they go bust. This game, they bet big on the first hand, and had to lay down, then went all-in on a pair of 7s, three-barrell bluffing, not even top pair on the board, betting into a player who held QQ and just kept letting them bet.
Their hyper aggression triggered a few other players at the table into playing for huge pots very early.
Within the first 13 minutes of the game, four players had already busted out. I took two of them out on a hand where I had KK, one was already crippled from a previous hand and forced all-in by the blinds, I opened modestly, the other came all-in against me with TT after let out a pot-sized bet on the flop, and I called them and took all their chips.
Later on, I took a big hand from the player to my right, DAVBUGSY, this time with AA, getting a huge stack away from them that they had won earlier with Quad 6666s. They called a big raise from me with Q7, flopped top pair, Queens, and shoved, I called and won the hand. Not very long after that, a similar setup where I had KK, for the second time, and the hand unfolded the exact same way: I raised big, they called, they shoved the flop, I called, but this time they rivered a flush and took a lot of chips from me. I was still in very good health, and this brought them back from the brink of being in a vulnerable spot.
I ended up knocking out Wivy on a hand where I had limped Q3 and flopped two pair, they had flopped top pair Queens, with a big kicker. I had been in several hands with this player, and I could tell they were stealing a lot of pots from late position with pot-sized bets, so I check-raised them to let them bet, which they did, I raised, and they came back with a big shove at me, so I called, and took them down.
This left us 3-up, and I finished off the 3rd place winner by checking into them when the flop came 355 and I had Q5, they shoved on a 3, and I called. They were a small enough stack that it wasn’t a big risk for me even if they’d had flopped a full house somehow. Easy trap.
Heads up, I was against the player who I’d taken a lot of chips from on AA and then given a lot of them back on KK. I had the bigger stack, by between 1.5-2:1, and they are a good player, but I just had excellent cards. QQ twice, 55, which I just limped and folded, as I wasn’t desperate. I ended up winning the whole thing on 98s, flopping middle pair and then improving to two pair on the river. My opponent had top pair and tried a smallish bet on the flop, which I called, then a bigger bet on the Turn, which I raised; he responded by shoving, I called, he had K4 and a pair of Kings, and my two underpair won the hand when the river drew a brick.
It seems a mix of aggro and passive/slow play worked well for me in this game. But also I got great cards.