A word of advice: unless you want<\/i> to give Maudie your money, don’t get tangled up in a hand with her. Can I say now after the fact that I meant it when I said it was a donation? Yeah, I don’t believe me either.<\/p>\n
Had another three hour session of $25 NL ring with the bloggers again tonight. In attendance were Pauly<\/a>, Maudie<\/a>, NegativeEV<\/a>, UWannaBet<\/a>, and Pauly’s friend Hank. Never figured out who the guy in the 4 seat was, but he was there, too. After giving most of my stack to Maudie (respect her preflop raises!), I rebought and ended the night quadrupled.<\/p>\n I’ve appreciated all the great trip reports to come out of last weekend’s Vegas trip, but man, I’ve really missed the nightly NL sessions. When you’re sitting at a table by yourself, it gets boring really quickly. In these NL sessions, half the time I’m paying attention to the hand I’m playing and the other half I’m paying attention to the chat. It’s also good to have a cheering squad when you win, and people to commiserate when you get sucked out by a maroon<\/a>. Tonight I had the distinct displeasure of being put on a hand three times by NegativeEV. Not that that’s a bad thing. It’s an eye-opener. He knows what hands I play and how I play them. I need to have a talk with that guy. This is a serious leak that needs to be patched, and who better to help me than a fellow blogger? For the most part in NL I play a pretty straightforward game, and I suppose this makes it obvious to an observant Joe whether I’ve got something to fear or not. <\/p>\n Destroying the odds<\/i><\/p>\n If I’ve got a hand that’s vulnerable to draws, I usually bet enough to destroy the pot odds. So here’s the question: am I leaving bets on the table by not taking on the risk of getting outdrawn? Because the goal in NL is to take everything in the other guy’s stack and\/or use him to double up. I do think, however, that this straightforward play buys me a lot of respect at the table, allowing me to take down pots with strong draws or second pair after I’ve established myself.<\/p>\n Getting outdrawn<\/i><\/p>\n Of course, in a 3-way pot, if opponent 1 calls my bet, opponent 2 with his good draw instantly has odds to call (well, he doesn’t, actually, but it becomes much more justifiable–missing the turn with these draws is a disaster in terms of odds since you won’t see the river for free). This leads to the following dilemma: Most times I bet the turn and take it down right there. But there are those memorable times where the person who made the mistake calling on the flop is suddenly ahead. I have a very tough time letting go of a hand that was ahead on the flop (which means, of course, that the caller actually had great<\/i> implied odds for his draw–poker is such a mindfuck). Yet I’ve also made “good” laydowns to good players who figured they could get me off. Iggy has done this to me (you bastard), and a few people at Doyle’s Room have done this to me, much to my dismay. I think the British players I’ve run into there have bluffing as a standard tool in their repertoire, which makes for some pretty high variance games (I’ve never made 13 times my buy-in at Party, but I usually don’t lose my stack, either).<\/p>\n A little help?<\/i><\/p>\n So these are the situational weaknesses in my game: not making my hands as profitable as they can be, calling when I shouldn’t, and folding when I shouldn’t. And I have no idea what I can do to address them other than to play more hands and improve my subconscious feel for the game. If anyone out there has some good insights or tips, they’d be much appreciated.<\/p>\n Addendum<\/em><\/p>\n I just went back and read HDouble’s “How to beat low-limit no-limit: a beginner’s guide”<\/a> and RDub’s follow-up “No Limit Part Two: RDub manipulates the pot.”<\/a> Good stuff. Then I came across this:<\/p>\n The decision’s easy when you’ve got mismatched stacks. Either it doesn’t take a lot out of you, or you’re so far down already it doesn’t matter as much. Even if you’re evenly matched but on the low end of the scale, it’s not a terrible thing. But when it’s you and the other big stack at the table and he’s asking you to put the rest of your hard-earned winnings into the pot with his… I’ll tell you one thing: it’s a hell of a lot easier to put everything in the pot and dare him to call you than it is to call.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A word of advice: unless you want to give Maudie your money, don’t get tangled up in a hand with her. Can I say now after the fact that I meant it when I said it was a donation? Yeah, I don’t believe me either. Had another three hour session of $25 NL ring with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poker"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/psIKy-gt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1021\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nToo obvious?<\/i><\/p>\n