Shabbir's Diary

Vegas trip report, October 2009

Though I live near card rooms in the Bay area, I like to go to Vegas occasionally as a sort of personal poker camp.  The time purely devoted to poker allows me to experiment with my game in a way that leads to deep analysis for a prolonged period of time.  Also with someone along whose poker experience I trust, like Katie, I go over different hands and situations with the benefit of an additional point of view.

It was Katie's birthday this last week so we both headed to Vegas to celebrate.  I got four full days of cards in.

The poker strategy book for this trip

I've been reading Gary Carson's excellent poker book, The Complete Book of Hold'em Poker.  Prock suggested I get it.  When I asked what this book had in it that the 10 other poker books I own didn't, he said something along the lines of, "Other poker books have some empirically-derived wisdom about poker.  Carson does an excellent job at laying out theories of how the game of poker works and then which strategies are appropriate to which situations."

In short, Carson's book teaches you how to understand the situational nature of poker, and that is invaluable.

Have you ever asked someone a poker question like, "How do I play this hand in this situation?" and had them respond with "It depends"?  Carson's book lays out the different ways of getting a better answer than "It depends" by evaluating the context of the game being played and why what may seem like the very same two cards requires different actions in different environments.

(And yes, those links to the book are Amazon affiliate links with credit to me.)

I won't review the whole book here, but a couple of concepts were in full effect as instructional lessons during this trip.

First, the poker results

Total hours played: 29.91 hrs (all Limit Hold'em)

Net result: -$20

Hourly rate: -$0.67 / hr (don't quit your day job, you need it to pay for  this hobby)

    * $2/$4 Hold'em: 8.75 hrs, +$80
    * $3/$6 Hold'em: 3.66 hrs, -$108
    * $4/$8 Hold'em: 17.5 hrs, +$8

Here's the session by session breakdown.

A crash course in game selection

I will never, ever dismiss loose no-fold-em $2/$4 tables again.  People often complain about how they can't win at $2/$4 because nobody ever folds.  Carson's book explains that such a game is a best-draw-wins style of game.  You are suddenly armed with the tools to play $2/$4 Hold'em where 9 people see the flop and 4 of them call everything down to the river.

Once I had learned this lesson, and that in such a game Ace-King-suited was the ideal starting hand, instead of Ace-Ace, I was in heaven.  I adjusted my strategy, playing hands that were likely to flop enormous draws (unless the table started playing tight) and playing them very fast and hard.

Carson concisely explains the fallacy of starting hand charts is that they don't take into account these game conditions and become frustrated when their Aces don't hold up against eight opponents.  There is a hand chart, probably put in at the behest of his publishers, but it serves mostly to explain how to group different kinds of hands.  The first thing you do when you see it is re-arrange it depending on the style of table you're at.

In addition, because I understood how the power of different types of hands goes up or down depending on game conditions, I was able to view hands like King-King entirely differently at the tight $4/$8 game versus the very loose $2/$4 game and behave appropriately to minimize my losses.

All of this leads to my conclusion that I have never been happier to play $2/$4 Hold'em with a bunch of clueless people at Planet Hollywood.  When they all decided to see the flop, my big drawing hands got enormous overlays to draw, and when my opponents started getting frisky on the flop I had a pretty easy time of punishing them by extracting maximum value for my hand/draw.

Though not all three of my $2/$4 sessions were enormous money catchers, in every one of them I was able to run my stack up pretty high during them.  From now on I'm going to look for games with these ideal loose conditions, as I now have an excellent sense of how to extract the maximum value from them.

Even clueless players will react to your play

This was a lesson I learned at the Venetian, when I bought in for $200 and then ran my stack up to about $700 at $4/$8 when a couple of poor players started calling everything and making the table a 7-people-see-the-flop sort of table.  At the height of my run of good cards and favorable table conditions, Katie noticed my opponents starting to call less.  This let me start bluffing people out of pots without cards, but their psychology went through a number of phases.

1. Anyone can win, I'll call this down.
2. Wait, this guy wins a lot, he can't possibly have hit a flush again, could he?
3. This guy always had good cards, and he always raises on the river, I'm going to fold.
4. I've lost a lot of money to this guy, I'm only going to play good hands.

Katie said that when I started raising a lot pre-flop, and after my stack grew big enough that it got in the way of me seeing my cards, people stopped playing against me.  They stopped calling 7 people to the flop, and they folded to me a lot more.  In essence, they started playing better although mostly unintentionally.  The game had changed, and I also stopped getting cards.  I was able to steal a few pots, but I was slowly leaking money away. 

I even remember the moment when it happened.  A older local man, who was known to call every raise, play most of his hands, and show down Ace-high hands without a pair, suddenly became tight aggressive.  He preflop hand selection became downright good, and he only showed strong hands on the river.  It was like I could see a switch flip on his head.  When I asked Katie if she thought his table-neighbor had told him to change his play, she said "No, I think he just lost $300 in an hour."  I had motivated him to become a much better player.

Not even when another player went on a rush of winning hands did people return to their loose-calling-station style.  The table conditions were broken, and I did not know how to fix them.

As I look back on it now, raising a lot pre-flop probably made people want to shun pots with me, as I'd established the image that I couldn't be beat.  Also the river value raises hurt when you're on the receiving end of them, and probably taught people to fold more.

While it's possible to make money when people behave this way, it requires bluffing, and that strategy carries a lot more risk than playing big, pot-odds-correct draws.  Reading individual players becomes important so you know when to bluff, and I'm not particularly good at that yet.  I missed several opportunities to bluff in late position and lost pots I could have had.  I also bluffed at pots I shouldn't have in late position and just cost myself unnecessarily.

In the future I'm going to have to figure out how to recognize when the table conditions change so radically, and if I'm up, just get up and leave.

The difference between $4/$8, $3,$6 and $2/$4

While every table goes through different conditions, I generally found that the typical $2/$4 table has 5-8 people calling to see the flop, and 2-4 people seeing the river.  At $3/$6 3-5 people see the flop and 2-3 see the river, at $4/$8 2-3 people see the flop and usually just 2 people see the river.

Although I tried everything, my preference was to play $2/$4 (at Planet Hollywood).  It was an easy game, with little trickiness and an incredible overlay for any good hand I played.  I hope I can find something equivalent in the Bay area.

Playing pairs in Limit Texas Hold'em

I caught a cold over the weekend and had just about enough energy to lay in bed, but not to get up.  (Not entirely true, since on day one of the cold I painted four rooms of the house, but that's probably why I was bed-ridden the next two days...)

While laid up in bed I took some time to go over the stats for the last 25,000 hands I've played since the beginning of the year.  I wanted to see what the numbers said about my winning hands empirically, versus what the a priori statistics say should have won.

One of the graphs I generated was a particularly interesting one.  For pocket pairs, this is my win rate when the pair makes one of the following hands: unimproved single pair, two pair, or a set.

Now it doesn't take a poker genius to tell you that you'll win more if your pocket pair hits a set than if it hits two pair.  But when you're sitting on a pair of 66's or 77's, and you're trying to decide when you whiff the flop and a big bluffer bets if you should call it to the river, this graph provides a little guidance.  Though every situation is different, those 66's are going to win unimproved about 25% of the time.

If you're comfortable with that, perhaps because one or two other passive calling station players are in the pot with you, then go for it.  But since your odds of hitting one of the two remaining sixes is not compensated by the size of the pot, your sixes aren't likely to survive.

This graph also illustrates the fallacy of the on board two pair, and shows that it makes no difference in your win rate since it's a community two pair, EVERYBODY has it.  In fact you can see that sometimes it just gives you two pair and others three of a kind.  (That's where that red line dips below the blue)

This exercise of building out a poker game empirically from a base of 25k hands played is a fun one, and probably what I'll do for October and November.  I've build out hand standards, both preflop and postflop, based upon what I saw in my own results.  Here's another great example:

I win, very rarely, with high card and one pair that I show down.  A lot of those situations are AK, AQ, or KQ.  With the giant caveat that all poker situations depend on the context, as a general rule I need to slow down or fold hands that aren't well on their way to two pair or better on the flop.

Again, I'm sure a million people have uttered this poker wisdom in one of the 200 books I have on my bookshelf, but that's not my game.  My game is in the PokerTracker database I keep, and when I study my game and drop the things that cost me money, my game improves.

(This exercise is called "lopping off your C game", and as far as I know it was first coined by Tommy Angelo, the Boddhisattva of Poker.)

When I looked at my graph yesterday, the money I had lost calling down with 1 pair or a high card entirely offset the money I had made with the better hands.  On a more positive note, I'm just about break even for the year.

I'll post another update in 5k hands or so after I've played my new empirical hand strategy for a while.   Before that, though, I'll probably post stuff from my Vegas trip in late October.

Movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"

Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" is a very unassuming and in fact bleak looking novel.  Like the post-apocalyptic world it depicts, the actual hardcover book is all black with barely a title on it.  The story is one of the few litmus tests of parenthood mindset.  Reading it is probably a gut-wrenching experience for anyone, with it's relentless crushing of hope as a father tries to keep he and his son alive in a world without food, where nothing grows, and people turn on each other in the most brutal of ways.

However the experience of reading the book as a parent, and a father, makes it doubly difficult.   My son is younger than the son in the book, but old enough to have the same conversations with me.  The father tries so hard to explain to the son why the world the way it is, and the son is just unable to grasp it because he lacks the pre-apocalyptic frame of reference.

Day to day, as they trudge through the remains of the world, the boy's optimism and his father's paternal instincts are all that keeps his father going.  You know from time to time, that the father could easily just lay down and die, and nothing but his love for his son is keeping him alive.

Parents everywhere, and probably most fathers of young children all cry at the end of the book and with good reason.  Take a moment and check out the trailer, which has been published in such a way as to thwart proper online sharing, so I can't just embed it here.

(And yes, I know there are rumors that they ruined McCarthy's ending.  I don't want to hear about it)

Would a Buddhist bluff at poker?

I'm around a number of Buddhists, though I'm not one myself.  (Or, you could say, I'm an awful Buddhist who drinks, smokes, eats meat and denies being a Buddhist.)   Recently, the lead teacher at the Insight Meditation Center, where I took their meditation course and occasionally attend while practicing my own form of bad Buddhism, mentioned that a Buddhist wouldn't bluff while playing poker since it was an act of false speech, and a violation of the five precepts (code of ethics) of Buddhism. 

As a refresher, they are:

1. Abstain from taking life.
2. Abstain from taking what is not given.
3. Abstain from sexual misconduct.
4. Abstain from false speech.
5. Abstain from fermented drink (though I would include all intoxicants).

Another poker writer I follow, who teaches an approach to poker that is remarkably Buddhist-like is Tommy Angelo.  He recently published an eight part series on learning poker that mirrors the Buddhist Eightfold Path and at the end, tried to deal with the question of Buddhists playing poker.

These questions have been bouncing around in my head for some time.  Would a Buddhist play poker?  Would they bluff?  Would they sit in a game with someone who clearly had a gambling addiction?  Ultimately, I do not think that the Dalai Lama, or any other really mindful Buddhist would start playing poker.  However if you are committed to playing poker, Buddhism suggests some specific ways to comport yourself at the table.

1: Abstain from taking life.

I don't think this is going to be a problem for you at the poker table, unless you know there is something you can do that will cause someone to be grievously injured.  At the Palms $4/$8 game in Vegas I once saw a man have an epileptic seizure upon making the best hand, but his opponents neither knew that fact about his medical history, nor did they have an ability to cause it.

Conclusion: You can play poker without worrying about taking life.

2: Abstain from taking what is not given

This one is trickier.  Assuming that you play for table stakes (what's on the table is the only thing you can bet) then you can assume that whatever chips a player buys in for are "what is given".  If you buy the chips, you are making a conscious decision to offer them.  In fact this means you can only play for table stakes, since if you were not, you might be in a hand and find yourself encouraging or asking an opponent to offer you something (his car, his girlfriend, that iPhone) as an asset to complete a bet.

Though I've just said it's kosher, you probably also don't want to encourage someone to bet, raise, or call while they're considering their decision.  Though they've already put their chips on the table, encouraging them to put more in the middle if they're considering not to would err on the wrong side of "taking what is not given".  It's also easier if you just don't talk during the hand.

Even when playing for table stakes, you might find your opponent considering a decision of whether or not to purchase more chips, or even to sit down.  You must not influence this decision by encouraging him.  (You are free to discourage him, especially if you think he has a gambling problem, but that's poor poker if you think you're the better player and not likely to help someone who's already standing in a casino.)

Conclusion: Do not encourage a player to play, put chips in the pot, or to buy more chips or you will be taking what is not given.

3: Abstain from sexual misconduct

Conclusion: You're not more likely to do this at the poker table than anywhere else.

4: Abstain from false speech

This is the thing you are most likely to do.  Bluffing is not the issue.  When you're in a hand, nobody expects you to only bet the best hand.  However you can avoid talking at all and also avoid giving away any information.  It's probably best to avoid lying about what you have ("Oh you better fold, I've got the nuts!") 

Outside the hand you shouldn't lie.  I've seen people deal with this in different ways, such as Tommy Angelo's trick of saying, "I never tell the truth when I talk about what I had".  I often say absolutely nothing when asked.

There are also situations where I've seen people play the "opposite game" (I'm looking at you Chris H.), where they give bad strategy tips to novices to further impair their game.  This is definitely false speech and should be avoided.

Conclusion: This is the most likely mistake, and governs everything you say outside a hand.  Do not lie outside the hand.

5: Abstain from fermented drink

Conclusion: Being intoxicated isn't very good for your poker game, as it dulls your intellectual capacities.  If you play a lot of poker, this is an excuse not to drink.

What's not covered?

An interesting question comes to mind: "What about berating other players for their bad play?"  None of the five precepts seem to discourage you from being a jerk.  And yet how could Buddhism be silent on the act of speaking in a demeaning manner about others that makes them feel unhappy?

I don't know Buddhism well enough to answer that with a reference to the dhamma (teachings of the Buddha).  But I do know enough about poker to fling this truism at you, "Don't tap on the glass, it disturbs the fish".  If a player is playing badly and you berate him, one of the following things will happen:

1. You will become over confident and play badly against him. Bad players are dealt the same number of awesome hands as good players, and when he catches one and takes your money, you'll be on tilt.
2. The act of complaining will make you more upset about his play as you spiral into tilt.
3. He will notice he is playing badly (thanks to you) and play better, depriving you of equity.
4. He will get up and leave altogether, depriving you of equity.

There's really no reason to berate a bad player from a poker point of view, and I doubt the Buddha would justify one, so don't do it.

If you have other suggestions about how to play poker as a Buddhist, post them in the comments!

What's it like to play a third of all the hands dealt to you?

Let me tell you, it's a lot of fun.  You're like a giant suckout machine, and people constantly curse you for being a donkey. 

I'm experimenting with a new starting Limit Hold'em hand set I created using pokerstove for a style I've named "Drunken Master".  Chris and Katie are familiar with this style, it's a wildly loose aggressive style that pushes the absolute limit of the mathematical leeway for preflop looseness.  It tends to work best against novice players that can be frustrated with your "awful" play, and play poorly postflop. 

For example, you call a raiser with QJo in position and if you catch a queen or a jack on the flop, you call down depending on the board.  Novice players tend to overplay their overcards and underpairs post flop, and this strategy catches a lot of pots that should otherwise be lost when you fold postflop in position.

Like most poker strategies, there are not hard and fast rules here.  You can't randomly call down with four opponents on the flop, or if you get stuck in the middle of a raising war between two players.

In practice, PokerTracker says my I'm putting money in voluntarily about 34% of the time, which means I'm playing roughly one third of my hands before the flop, though I'm folding on the flop a lot.  That number is just insane, and will get tuned down below 30% before I'm done honing this.  In the meantime it's really fun to play a full third of your hands.

What's more fascinating is that I'm losing about 3.91 big bets an hour, which means that at the stakes I'm running this experiment on ($.05/$.10 through $0.50/$1) I'm losing $1.96 / hour.  I'm 30 hours and 3,200 hands into it, and I've sworn to make it to about 5k before evaluating the hands in PokerTracker, so I'm logging as many hands as possible.  I'm two-tabling as well, since if you two table on Full Tilt Poker this month for 25 days they give you $50.  Over the next 30 hours, I'll probably lose another $60.  Between rakeback and the $50 bonus, I should be about even, though that isn't sustainable long term.

If you didn't start the month with the Full Tilt Take Two (Two Tabling) bonus, they might offer another, so keep an eye out.

Support for healthcare reform this Saturday in the Bay Area

This Saturday many of the groups that organized the "teabagging" anti-tax day protests are going to stand in front of the local offices of members of Congress and protest anything having to do with reforming healthcare.  This isn't a difference of opinion (public option vs no public option?  funding children's healthcare?), the groups organizing these rallies want nothing at all to change.  I can't fathom that position.

I am going to go and quietly, civilly, support my member of Congress (Rep. Jackie Speier) in changing some of the most egregious parts of the system.  I don't want her to think that these people are the only voters who feel strongly about this issue.

The "nothing is wrong, no reform at all" crowd's tactics so far have ranged from disruptive to outright armed threats of violence.  (http://bit.ly/1bgmTX)

Your help is needed.  If you can spare an hour of your saturday, from 11:45am to 12:45pm and think there's some things the healthcare system needs fixed, drop me an e-mail and I'll help you get situated. I'll arrange you a ride, I'll bring you a sign, and markers if need be, so you can make yourself heard.  If you know your member of Congress, you can check this list: http://recessrally.com/california/ and find the office of your member of Congress.

Let me know.

Phone: 415-683-7526

Email: shabbir@safdar.net

Flickr photo from user SocMed026

How you can help with healthcare during the recess: SF area

The healthcare reform debate is becoming very ugly, even by Washington standards.  Believe it or not, not all of our elected officials can be assumed to be pro-healthcare reform.

If you live in the Bay area and want to make a difference, letters to Senators Feinstein and Boxer would be a great help, along with one to your representative.  I want to help you, so here's the deal.

Write your letter telling your story either about how healthcare coverage was difficult or impossible to afford for you or someone you know, or how someone you know lost coverage they really needed.

Then drop me an email and I'll come bring you a tiny box of truffles from Five Star truffles as a thank you.  I would also love to hear your letter and your story, but if it's really personal you don't have to share it with me.  I'm still happy to know you wrote a letter.

To find your elected officials, you can look them up at congress.org

And don't forget, there are chocolate truffles coming your way.

How you can help with healthcare this weekend: East Bay friends

If you live in the East Bay, specifically in Rep. Pete Stark's district (CA-13), know that he's being targeted by the opponents of healthcare who have vowed to disrupt his town hall meetings this Saturday. 

To see an overlay of the district on Google maps, look at Rep. Stark's interactive district map.

He could really use your help showing up, being decorous, even holding up a sign saying, "I quietly support healthcare reform."  The meetings are this Saturday August 15th at:

 

FREMONT:

9:00am

Fremont Senior Center

40086 Paseo Padre Pkwy,

Fremont, CA 94538

 

SAN LEANDRO:

10:30am

San Leandro City Hall

835 E 14th St,

San Leandro, CA 94577

 

ALAMEDA:

12:00pm

Alameda City Hall

2263 Santa Clara Ave

Alameda, CA 94501

If you can't make it, but would like me to keep you in mind for a future helping out, please drop me an email at shabbir -at- safdar.net.

This is the last serious thing I will say publicly about the healthcare debate for months.

August 7, 2009

Dear Rep. Speier,

I am very happy to see that you have come out strong for a public option in healthcare.  Thank you for doing the right thing.  If you don't read the rest of this letter (it is long) please know that you have my support in pushing for universal healthcare, of which a public option is a key component.
There are a couple of myths floating around the healthcare debate that I want to address, not because I think you buy into them, but because I want you to know your constituents don't buy into them.

Myth: A public plan would put a bureaucrat in charge of your healthcare.  

Opponents of healthcare reform pretend this is a bad thing.  All insurance is by definition, part of a bureaucracy.  There is more paperwork in healthcare than we have trees.  Today we have health insurance bureaucracies run by for profit organizations who are not answerable to anyone except shareholders, whose interests are diametrically set apart from patients.   When they want to change the rules of your insurance coverage, they simply change the rules because they contractually reserved that right when you signed up.  And because they are a near monopoly in the market, you don't have any choice.

Government-run healthcare are systems that can be expected to follow reasonable and consistent rules, such as "You may not rescind coverage the day before you need to go in for chemotherapy treatment."  When they don't follow these rules, there are appeals to the courts and to elected officials.  The purpose of the enterprise, to keep you healthy and heal you when you're sick, is never lost.

Bureaucracy is inevitable with health insurance, whether run by the government or by the private sector.   I'd rather my chances of survival be chosen by me and my fellow constituents than by a board of directors.  I would prefer a bureaucracy run by someone responsive to me than by someone whose motivation is to pay out as little in healthcare services as possible.  Like public safety, healthcare should be a service not subject to market forces.

Myth: 2 out of 3 workers will lose coverage according to independent analysis by The Lewin Group
The Lewin Group is not an independent entity, it is an entirely owned subsidiary of health insurance company UnitedHealth.  Secondly, the rising cost of healthcare is driving people to lose their coverage because costs of employer funded healthcare are rising faster than we can keep up.  When I co-founded my web agency in 1997, we offered healthcare and paid the entire cost.  Today that isn't possible anymore and employees share part of the cost, and many business don't even offer coverage, or offer "sham" coverage.

The reality is that the current approach to health insurance has resulted in a loss of coverage for millions of people.  From 1998 to 2008, the percentage of large employers who offered retiree health coverage shrank from 66% to 31%, and the trend continues downward today .  [Kaiser Family Foundation, slide #12]

Rising costs will mean that many employees who are offered coverage won't be able to afford to accept it.  In addition, the KFF study shows that premiums have been rising quickly for the last ten years.  What isn't shown in that study is that out of pocket costs have been rising along with non-covered events.  We're paying more for plans that are covering less.  And that assumes that we can get insurance, or that we don't lose it through rescission.

Myth: There are millions of Americans who go uninsured (also known as "naked") in this country.  They should be motivated to work harder in order to afford health insurance.  We shouldn't just give them this benefit or they won't see an incentive to work hard.

For millions of uninsured Americans, maybe the best job they have been able to find is not enough to afford a $400 per month or more health insurance premium, or the copays that go with it.    In a capitalist labor market, some people just won't make enough money to afford health insurance as it costs today.  

Being poor in America, where we prize our standard of living, is itself a sufficient motivator to get people to work harder.  If the promise of a flat screen TV, a new car, or an exotic vacation isn't enough to motivate you to make more money, the promise of a life with health insurance isn't going to motivate you more.

Withholding health insurance means that these people will be poor and sick, which will do nothing to make it possible to work harder, and will likely only result in more expensive chronic conditions that our hospitals (and we) will end up absorbing the cost of.

Having a public health insurance option that refuses nobody means that when they do get sick, they can be automatically enrolled in the program and therefore reduce the risk pool and healthcare costs for everyone.  And of course, if they then decide that they want to buy a plan, they would be free to go on the open market and do business with the health insurance industry.

Thank you for fighting to hard for a public health insurance option.  As we have recognized our responsibility to protect the health of our elderly and our children, the public option will ensure that we cover our nation's working poor and middle class not covered by the healthcare market.

Sincerely,


Shabbir Imber Safdar

My first 5,000 hand experiment

So to recap, as I work on improving my Limit Texas Hold'em game, I concocted an experiment with my coach.  I used my calculations of each possible preflop hand against tables containing one to nine opponents each.  I then built a very solid preflop strategy, taking into account position and opponents, and set out to play 5,000 hands.  From the flop onward I've been studying hands with my coach, but it's not as easily quantifiable.  Obviously it's pointless to pursue hands that are completely pot-odds incorrect, but most of my flop and post-flop decisions are a little more subtle than that, and not as easily translated into formulas.

After about 5,048 hands of $0.25/$0.50 and $0.50/$1 I had played 53.68 hours, and 89 sessions. I had lost 1.08 big blinds per 100 hands or about $26.20.  (Thank god I had rakeback.  I paid $57.50 in rake and got about a third of that back.)

I then went and played live for the first time since before the experiment, and was amazed at the progress.  The drills had created discipline and focus and the poor decisions of some of my opponents were stunning.

So what to do with these hands?  How to analyze them?

Historically I have looked at my hands backwards, looking at large pots I lost, but because I often play very tight, I have to play a lot of hands to see river play.

The Bodhisattva of Poker, Tommy Angelo, has coined one approach to working on your game, called "Lopping Off Your C Game".  He categorizes your poker game into A, B, and C class, with your C-class decisions being full-on-tilt.  Your A game, and most of your opponents A game, is particularly close (unless you're Phil Ivey).  You can work on your A-Game all you want, but you're not going to get all that much better than your opponents.

However your C-game contains your worst decisions, and so too of your opponents.  Get rid of your worst decisions, and you become a much better player.

As I looked at my opponents in my $6/$12 Limit Hold'em game in Colma, I realized that the decision you make the most often that costs you the most money is whether to see a flop.  You make that decision over and over and over again, and you never get pot odds to make up for all those little mistakes, as you do in No Limit Hold'em when you win some guy's stack because you decided to play 75s, call his raise and hit two pairs when he shoved with his AKo on an A75 flop.

Analysis

So out of 5,048 hands, I saw the flop (out of the blinds) with 552 of them.  I was playing only 77+, A9s+, Ajo+, JTs+, and QJo+.  I was only calling raises with AKo+, AKs+, and 77+. 

I open limped 43 times.  Super bad.  I'm either letting other players in cheap with bad hands, or I'm playing something that should have been folded.

I cold called raises 40 times with hands weaker than my range.

I played subpar hands 79 times with hands like these:

• 44: 1
• 55: 3
• 66: 6
• 98s: 2
• J7s: 1
• Q9o: 1
• QTo: 1
• K9s: 1
• A8s-A2s: 45
• ATo-A2o: 18

Even before I do blinds analysis, which is where I think there's a lot of improvement to be done, all I have to do is get rid of these hands and I would lop off quite a bit of my C-game.

After going through these hands with my coach, I'm going to do another 5,000 hands.