Welcome, joey57.
Great question, @joey57!
In poker, “nut” means “best available.” A nut flush draw means that you are drawing to the best possible flush. As an example, if the flop reads A94, all of hearts, and you hold the king of hearts and a different-suited card in your hand, you will be drawing to the nut flush.
This can also apply to other draws. On a flop that reads 3JQ, if you hold KT, then you have an open-ended straight draw to the nuts on both sides, since either an ace or a nine will give you the best possible straight on the board. If you held T9 instead, you would still have an open-ended straight draw, but only an 8 would give you the nut straight, since a king would give you a straight, but a higher straight would be possible if someone else held AT.
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An old man once told me when i was about 8 years old …A wise man will set himself a target he knows he can reach only the fool will set it so high he has no chance of reaching …It took a few years before i fully understood what he was saying to me but once it clicked it stayed and that’s been a big philosophy in my life some what 35 years later and setting your self goals you can reach makes it even more pleasurable when you do reach them each time the goal gets a little higher not to much but a little
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Machiavelli would not agree…
“…like the skillful archer, who seeing that the object he would hit is distant, and knowing the range of his bow, takes aim much above the destined mark; not designing that his arrow should strike so high, but that flying high it may alight at the point intended.”
Always aim higher than you can easily reach!
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Welcome to the Forum, Lee2294!
Whatever formula that keeps you moving forward seems valid to me. Its all a balancing act, right? IMO, fear of failure is the thing that holds most people back. I decided early in life that I’d rather fail than not try. I decided that I’d rather be a spectacular failure than a mediocre success. If I wasn’t failing often enough, I wasn’t setting the bar high enough to challenge myself sufficiently. That’s what keeps me motivated but everyone has to find their own way. The outcome is only certain if we quit.
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Edison knew more than 1000 ways NOT to make a working lightbulb. It was IBM’s CEO, Dr. Watson, who famously had a sign in his office reading “Double Your Rate of Failure!” His point was that if you weren’t failing often enough, you weren’t trying new things and finding ways to make them work. We earn our successes by our failures. (By that standard, I should be a genius, alas.)
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Players bets constitute a language. Each player speaks a slightly different language, and so it takes time to understand what they are saying. As you learn their language, each word they say begins to shape their range of cards, making some hole cards more likely, and others less likely. Think in terms of that distribution of hole cards, and their pattern of betting frequency, that defines their poker language. Avoid the tendency to visualize their holding a single set of specific cards, and instead think of playing the same hand 10,000 times, with the same information each time, but your opponent has all of the different cards in their range. Now evaluate the EV (expected value - how much you will earn or lose statistically) of various possible lines against those ranges (not against specific holdings, again), and then decide on some way of mixing up your play so that most of the time you are taking lines close to the highest EV… Do this on every street. Your head should be hurting now. Poker is hard.
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Yes–poker IS hard, but how well you have stated this very important strategy. Well put!
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oh you over thought this alot lol. no comment lol
you should try tiling a bathroom shower for the first time.
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LOL… putting new tiles in a bathroom is far too intimidating.
Certainly we can play poker on cruise control, and that can be enjoyable, and this is a play money site after all. But on this thread, thinking about what might constitute good advice for those of us trying to improve, I think just appreciating how complex poker is, and approaching it perhaps like you might if wanting to climb the ranks in the chess world, can be nice. And when trying to get stronger, I think measuring your opponents frequencies in different situations is one of the best ways of understanding their ranges. Once you somewhat understand their ranges in a situation, you can start formulating counter strategies (your own response frequencies for various types of actions). You don’t have to take it to the point where your head hurts of course, but I think for many of us there is a satisfaction to be found in building toward mastery, and poker really does have a tremendous amount of hidden depth, and there is room on the poker table to rival the head hurtin summit that is tiling a bathroom.
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