Hello! I've been going great guns the past month or so, basically traceable to the day I got rid of my old chair and spent 3 hours moving a giant reclining and massively comfortable armchair into my office. This has made a huge difference to my mindset. Previously, I think tilt was starting off by manifesting as pain and general discomfort. The chair was just really badly made, it tilted forwards and had a really small seating area and I swear I had to struggle to stay on it!
So yeah since then I've had 90k hands winning at 7bb. Other mental stuff has helped, I resolved to lose all my fear again by basically facing it- this means accepting that things are going to go wrong a lot and that this is fine. Freed from the shackles of fear, all sorts of creative lines present themselves.
I've also been *thinking* about poker a lot, and this is the big difference between a 'grinder' mindset and the mindset of a crusher. A grinding mindset is a predictable one; there are very few surprises when I'm up against any high volume player. AA is always 3bet and 4bet. Draws are always barreled. Bluffs are never made into strong ranges. Exceptions to this are few and far between- I'd probably list Flippety, OTB, Amarn and Wizard as the few capable of mixing it a little it. They all do pretty well.
I've had a slight wobble the past couple of days and that's what this blog is about addressing. I have a notepad file with a list of technical concepts to think about and this has gotten really really long. This means I have loads of random concepts floating around my head that need committing to paper. These shouldn't be too much of a problem though, and they probably fall outside the scope of this blog given the number of them. The main issue the past few days has just been one of mindset. A certain sense of 'micro rushing' that I can't quite explain any other way.
Basically what it means is that, say you're in a hurry to play lots of good hands and get rich like I am, then this can result in unhelpful behaviours such as rushing in the short term. It's like a fractal, if your overall aim is to quickly get rich, then you can zoom and zoom down into that mindset and find that decisions are rushed, variance is deliberately but subconsciously increased, even the mouse is clicked much faster. This causes the opposite of what it is intended to do- and I've found in life that this is a constant 'law of the universe'- 'grasping' at your goal means it is never attained.
A couple of technical reminders before I finish- basically the goal of crushing cash poker is to constantly be thinking in terms of making sure our range is protected. Whenever an idea seems good 'in a vacuum', the fact that we haven't considered our entire range probably means that our intentions are pretty obvious.
To take an example, say on the river we have a range of air and obvious bluffcatchers that are always calling. To fold out the air we only need to bet 1/3 pot. To get max value we need to bet much bigger. Because people don't think about the entirety of their own and our range, they end up just betting the 1/3 with their bluffs and going 3/4 with their value. Good players notice this and you get annihilated in that spot, perhaps without ever even realising that you are- which is actually probably the true killer!
So in that spot, we need a consistent size. Splitting the difference and going 2/3ish is probably enough disguise, though it obviously depends on the ratio of value to bluffs too.
Ok that's enough for now, I'm going to play and take my time and have fun and see what happens. By the way I'm going to cull a lot of people from the readership so I know who's reading, so if you want to stay reading please let me know either in the comments or on Skype. Off the top of my head I'll probably keep Chris, Dodgy, Pawel without them needing to ask as I don't ever play VS them. Anyone else, please lemme know. Bye.
Thursday 18 June 2015
Sunday 7 June 2015
Tournament Adjustments
I occasionally play the odd tournament, but in the past 2-3 months have felt like I'm burning money a lot. I went through a purple patch of feeling in complete control and having great results, but it feels at the moment that I'm taking my 500nl mindset into things like the Sunday Million and it's just not working. So, I'm here to flesh out in my mind the differences and adjustments I need to take.
One thing I was very aware of when doing well is that chips lost are worth far more than any chips won. This means that taking marginal, high variance spots is far less attractive. Arguably, a 'blind' cbet that should overall make a tiny bit of chipEV is a good example. In cash games I'll make very marginal cbets and barrels, do the same with marginal value, and be content to do so because like I'll be able to handread well and play well and it's good for my overall range and I can reload and so on.
If I'm left making a pot sized bluff on the river that's going to work 51% of the time, then we should go for it. Our play up until the river takes this into account too, meaning these spots occur with decent regularity.
In tournaments, in general, a 51% successful pot size bluff should not be made, because the lost EV when the bluff fails is far higher than the EV gained when it succeeds due of stack playability. I'm not sure how a new number is quantified, it depends on a lot of factors such as tournament stage, average stack, our stack, structure, bubble proximity, etc. I can't find a single article or video anywhere covering such topics, which almost makes me think there's some sort of conspiracy of silence over it, but I know it's a *thing*.
The other major difference between cash games and tournaments is that tournament players seemingly can't hand-read, like, at all. This isn't a problem of course, but means that certain types of bluffs are far less effective. The postflop play reminds me of 50nl and sometimes 100nl too, ie I'm often in spots just being like WTF are you doing, and having no clue- random turn minraises etc. So I struggle to properly handread them in the same way as cash players, because there's less of a predictable PF base on which to build and much less certainty with how people will play certain hands postflop. It actually makes me realise just how predictable cash players actually are, and how much EV there is probably to be had by occasionally not, for example 3betting every premium PF, barrelling every draw etc.
So, if marginal spots are not to be taken, and there's less default information to be taken, then I need to be more certain before committing chips and also try to extract more information. To this end, I think doing a lot more checking on earlier streets is the way to go, particularly OOP. Upon checking, we can start to handread a little based on sizing and PSR. On wet boards, we can assume that strong hands will get betted allowing us to overbet the turn, VS weak bets we can CC and see what happens on the turn, stuff like that. Having a checking style doesn't preclude us being very very aggressive in the right spots, but it does mean the spots will be better, albeit less frequent.
That's all for now, I've got more stuff to add, but basically I just wanted to re-condition myself to be in the frame of mind of low variance survival, rather than the 'live life on the edge, take every marginal spot, bleed chips VS players who can't fold' approach I've taken in the past.
One thing I was very aware of when doing well is that chips lost are worth far more than any chips won. This means that taking marginal, high variance spots is far less attractive. Arguably, a 'blind' cbet that should overall make a tiny bit of chipEV is a good example. In cash games I'll make very marginal cbets and barrels, do the same with marginal value, and be content to do so because like I'll be able to handread well and play well and it's good for my overall range and I can reload and so on.
If I'm left making a pot sized bluff on the river that's going to work 51% of the time, then we should go for it. Our play up until the river takes this into account too, meaning these spots occur with decent regularity.
In tournaments, in general, a 51% successful pot size bluff should not be made, because the lost EV when the bluff fails is far higher than the EV gained when it succeeds due of stack playability. I'm not sure how a new number is quantified, it depends on a lot of factors such as tournament stage, average stack, our stack, structure, bubble proximity, etc. I can't find a single article or video anywhere covering such topics, which almost makes me think there's some sort of conspiracy of silence over it, but I know it's a *thing*.
The other major difference between cash games and tournaments is that tournament players seemingly can't hand-read, like, at all. This isn't a problem of course, but means that certain types of bluffs are far less effective. The postflop play reminds me of 50nl and sometimes 100nl too, ie I'm often in spots just being like WTF are you doing, and having no clue- random turn minraises etc. So I struggle to properly handread them in the same way as cash players, because there's less of a predictable PF base on which to build and much less certainty with how people will play certain hands postflop. It actually makes me realise just how predictable cash players actually are, and how much EV there is probably to be had by occasionally not, for example 3betting every premium PF, barrelling every draw etc.
So, if marginal spots are not to be taken, and there's less default information to be taken, then I need to be more certain before committing chips and also try to extract more information. To this end, I think doing a lot more checking on earlier streets is the way to go, particularly OOP. Upon checking, we can start to handread a little based on sizing and PSR. On wet boards, we can assume that strong hands will get betted allowing us to overbet the turn, VS weak bets we can CC and see what happens on the turn, stuff like that. Having a checking style doesn't preclude us being very very aggressive in the right spots, but it does mean the spots will be better, albeit less frequent.
That's all for now, I've got more stuff to add, but basically I just wanted to re-condition myself to be in the frame of mind of low variance survival, rather than the 'live life on the edge, take every marginal spot, bleed chips VS players who can't fold' approach I've taken in the past.
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