Man, I need to write blogs more. When I don't I just end up with so many ideas floating around my head. They collide and interact and contradict and lead to brain implosion, and so the only way to make any sense of them is to write regular strategy blogs and get my ideas all down on paper.
I'm having a mini crisis of 'where is my edge' at the moment. On the one hand, my edge is very clear at a very decent long term 200nl winrate, but that winrate is a mean average of probably winning at a theoretical 10bb when playing well and losing at 1bb when playing badly.
Playing very openly lead to a mad heater for much of this month, but I've possibly started to push it too far and become too obsessed with winning every single pot, especially once it reaches a certain size. One thing I can remember doing well earlier in the month was having complete tranquillity about letting small pots go, and this includes 3bet pots where no bets have yet gone in. This meant that if money started to go in, I had a very clear idea of how that pot was likely to end up in my stack, and if it didn't end up in my stack I'd at least go down fighting :-P.
This ties into reverse equity too..... when you have 77 on 942ss and someone cbets the flop decently big IP, it's just a CR or fold, and probably a fold. Running this situation through the previous paragraph, there's many more situations where I'm forced to fold or make bad calls, than there are situations where I get shipped the pot. In other words, a basic -EV cc, even though we're miles ahead of their range.
In terms of bluffs, this means for example that I don't just blindly auto stab a turn in a 3bet pot. Instead, really zone in on the hand, work out if I need to fire one or two, handread the opponent from the beginning of the hand, work out how our range looks in his eyes and derive from that his strategy if we were to apply maximum pressure.
So letting small pots go, avoiding reverse equity, and applying maximum pressure when needed. One other major sorta 'strategy approach' though is in the constant applying of pressure in small pots when our opponents' range is weak. I'm talking basic flopzilla stuff, the kind of bluffs that aren't really too common 'cos all the training sites preach balance and discipline and meekly check folding every 994r flop with QJ 'cos 'we can't rep anything'. Hardly anyone really fights back at 200nl, and if they do, and we are attentive, we can easily adjust to that (the kind of people with like 33% fold to cbet are typical candidates) by going more depolarised for value. Overbets are also our friend when it doesn't seem like we can win the pot too easily.
So complementing all the above is just a good mindset, excellent mental game, autopiloting to an extent but really zoning in when we get to a medium sized pot, remembering to handread on calls and generally looking to confuse and be creative wherever possible. That's my edge summed up in about as short a way as I can manage! Now to grind a million hands over the next 30 days and get myself back to 2-5 with a decent bankroll.
dan
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