Update

I really feel like things are coming together at the moment. My friend Stefan gave me a massively important and helpful talk about his mental approach to poker which has really resonated with me. As always, it's about being in the moment in each and every decision and trusting your heart.

So flowing from that has come some important technical considerations that have been getting neglected. There's been so much poker thought coming out that I'm struggling to keep pace with it all. I'm just writing down quick notes and then planning to write it out more in-depth in this place and others.

I've been looking for an 'approach' for a while. And what that means is an overall approach to poker- something to fall back on when making a decision. Some people have the pure exploitative approach, they'll 3bet 95o if they think their opponent folds enough to 3bets. Others have an approach of implementing 'pseudo game theory', ie they religiously don't want to defend too little and always find a bluff even if their opponent never has a hand that will fold.

I keep playing around with GTORB, but still have more videos about it watch. This has re-energised what was once my main goal when playing poker, and that is simply to make less mistakes than our opponents. Mistakes can take many forms, but it's essentially anything that doesn't fair well VS the solid GTO (strategies that I'm attempting to implement). Obviously not actual GTO in virtually any hand- it's just too mad and complex- but what each GTO strategy has in common is that every hand is well supported by plenty of other hands that stop our opponent from doing anything to make a lot of money from us. Key to this is board coverage and range coverage, ie we should never get to the river with 'no bluffs' or have a river comes that completely destroys our range.

This approach does wonders for our mental game too, as well as giving a solid technical foundation which doesn't disappear the moment we go out of the zone.

Fear has been a big problem for me, but this approach takes that away. If we're playing Sauce, just make sure we're not doing anything terribly exploitable and what's he going to do? A lot of this does require a fair bit of ingame thought, but that's ok. For example, we get to the river with 45% bluffs and 55% value. We need to think to ourselves whether we're going to bet a normal size and lose some of our bluffs, or maybe bluff all our bluffs but go 5x pot. Which works best, and why is this? Typically in the above example if comes down to the capedness or otherwise of our opponent's range, and so VS a capped range we take the big betsize and VS the uncapped we go a more standard size.

4betting deep IP ranges, I was thinking about this today when I had AA in this spot. Basically we end up flatting a lot in a vacuum, but this hurts our range because it loses value with AA. I decided something like Q9s, J8s, and a smattering (red suits) of the 64s, 75s of the world, + AKo and occasionally something like 22-33. All giving us really good board coverage and virtually making sure we're making no mistakes postflop.

Anyway this is a ramble now, off to play and review.