Poker homework: what hands beat you?

So my coach and I were talking about some different ways of doing board analysis, and he suggested I compute "the hands that beat me" on every street.  Getting significantly better at board analysis is important as I move up limits from the microstakes I've been playing.  While I'll continue to use poker bonuses on…

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Safdar Tournament Poker Bootcamp: Results

[I love this photo of Vegas I took on the strip outside Planet Hollywood.  Rampant overbuilding, sex blatantly for sale, and Salvation Army, all in the same shot.  It's the epitome of the city to me.  -Shabbir] Though I played a lot of poker, and met a new poker colleague who lives in the Bay…

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Poker coaching

So my coach and I have settled into a new routine.  I play all week, pick a session at random, and then run it through a processor and add my notes and send it off.  A day later he sends back notes on my notes and we get on the phone and talk for an…

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Poker Strategy – Pot Odds, Hand Strength, and other topics

IntroductionI’ve been playing poker since I was a kid, when my family played 5 card draw in between highly competitive games of Uno.  (Cheating was a strategy, and mirrors were employed once to great effect.)  However I’ve really only been studying poker since 2005.  I’m at that level where if a handful of casual friends…

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Safdar Tournament Poker Bootcamp

Attention friends, especially Matt's friend, Lem who will be in Vegas December 5th: There's talk of a tournament-focused trip to Vegas to reprise the Safdar Tournament Poker Bootcamp from this summer, the weekend of December 5th thru Tuesday December 9.  Most of us have not cleared it with our spouses. If it comes together, we'd…

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Shenanigans in Reno, NV

My Obama partner and I have two red staters assigned to watch us. We all sit here in the observer pen.   They complain about everything we do, and have the McCain palin lawyers on speed dial. My friend in sparks brought me a coat and hat since it's snowing and the McCain volunteer stood…

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Building your mathematical poker game (preflop)

One of the first things my poker coach did, after looking at a sample of my hands, was to send me to hit the books and tell me not to play poker until I was done with probability homework.  He wanted me to work the math out for my game to understand the values of…

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Things 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."…

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