Poker analysis
Dealing with a blinds thief / stealing the blinds / defending your blind
It happens all the time in Hold’em: you’re in the big blind and some jackass goes to steal your big blind. Stealing blinds is good money in a casino that doesn’t rake until the flop, but to be successful at it you have to be able to play after the flop or pick on a…
Read MoreThings that make me happy
My poker tutor doesn’t think I’m a complete idiot. He sat behind me today while I played a 3 hour session at my local cardroom and gave me a lot of really good advice, none of which was, "You need to go find a lower stakes game while you figure out how to play poker."…
Read MoreModeling $3/$6 players
I’m doing some math modeling of hand equity of various hands with pokerstove. What happens to JJ at a table when someone raises,and you’ve got 2, 3, 4 players? What if they’re solid players? What if one is a complete donk? Does the hand have a positive or negative expected value? If you were doing…
Read MoreHow do you play Aces when there’s an Aces cracked bonus available?
For reasons more complicated than I can explain here, my weekday schedule has me awake when everyone else is asleep from 4:30am or 5am onwards. Tuesday through Friday I’ve been spending 2-3 hours every morning at my local poker room. (Yes it’s surprisingly full at that time of the morning) From 6-9am they have a…
Read MoreA raid in Maryland; my poker game; my big yard project
It hasn’t hit the news yet, but there was another SWAT team raid of a poker game in Maryland in the last week. This time it appears they just confiscated the money and chips, cards, and tables. Perhaps they will press charges later, but on the whole, I suspect this is just easy money and…
Read MoreMy 2008 poker year thus far
So its not quite mid year but it’s close enough that I’m going to do a little bit of analysis out loud. (I’ve also been traveling like a fiend and my company is in the middle of living a genuine Business School Case Study, which let me tell you, it’s not fun to live. They…
Read MoreFunniest thing I heard all day
Some of you know that I take my poker game very seriously. I’ve been working for four years on my game, through books, occasional coaches, analysis, and tons of practice. I recently picked up a new poker coach and he said something that I found hysterical. "If you enter the pot and your opponents aren’t…
Read MoreCrushing the $3/$6 tables
It being his birthday, I’m going to give my buddy Chris Hannigan an unusual present. I’m going to freely admit now that in the past, when I said, "You can’t make money at $3/$6 limit poker", I was full of crap. Chris always disagreed with me. I dropped down to the $3/$6 tables the other…
Read MorePoker experiment is over
So I think my experiment with session length is over. Playing last night live and microstakes online for the last few weeks has yielded a number of epiphanies. The reason that I’m trying to run short sessions is to cover for leaks in my game. The longer I sit, the more the leaks cut into…
Read More“In God We Trust, all others bring data.” -Edward Deming
You’ve known that I have for a long time tried hard to figure out what is the appropriate session length in poker. It’s so much harder than Sklansky’s clever but not useful cliche, "Don’t quit winners", or Mike Caro’s advice "You’re always even" (so don’t try and get even before you leave the game). So…
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