Saturday, February 11th: WTF; I have a "call" button??

Again, apologies for a brief hiatus in postings...busy, busy, busy, busy, busy.

Curses! My law school is objecting to my proposed Sydney study-abroad plan for next semester. I am appealing the decision, but sadly I would only put the probability of me not being relegated to dreary Philly this Fall at around 25%. On the bright side, had my best ever single day yesterday: managed about 325 BB in just 2,700 hands. Came at a time when i had been feeling pretty shitty too. Had just had a big blowup earlier in the day with a girl I was seeing, and was just stewing miserably at home. Which, I might add, is probably the only time when I think my tilt-proof armor is a little vulnerable. I know that when I'm fuming, I get a little too LAGgy, and start seeing value in hands that are clearly -EV. So I just read for a few hours to calm down, then said WTF and started playing for a bit (for the record, this was still probably a bad idea). But as the 1-day chart below shows, I guess things just went my way.



Anyway, I'm really looking forward to playing in the Party Poker Million V Cruise limit hold'em tournament...I guess we'll get to see just how good or bad my limit game is. Even though I think I'm one of the better middle-to-high-stakes online guys, I checked out the placings from previous Party cruise tournaments, and several big-name pro's actually went out among the first few dozen players eliminated...so I guess skill isn't the ultimate determinant. In fact, that's probably my biggest concern about this limit tournament thing: I feel as though results are FAR more dependent on how the cards come out than in a NL tourney. In the latter, you can make things happen, even if you go card-dead for a while, but I'm worried that a limit tourney just won't allow for as much manoeuvering. I think if you sat me down with a bunch of Party online qualifiers and just let us play a standard cash game, I'd stand a solid chance of ending up with a nice pile of chips, but I just don't think limit hold'em lends itself well to a rapidly escalating blind structure, which might account for a bunch of pro's busting out early. I guess we'll find out soon enough. One other "first" for my poker journey: Surprisingly, all 4 Party 50/100 games were pretty good at the same time the other day, so I 4-tabled them...I don't think I'd ever played more than one 50/100 table at once to that point, so I suppose that can be another feather in my LHE cap.

And judging from some decent reaction to last week's "table selection" entry, I've thought that it couldn't hurt to start including a few strategy bits in here, even though it's really not my favorite thing to do, because it seems to rile up people's contrarian juices. I get like 5 emails a week asking about strategy things, and I just don't always have time to answer them in as much detail as I would like. So maybe including a few discussion points here will satiate some of the people who want more info about just how I moved from a mediocre 3/6 player in January of last year to a fairly skilled 30/60 guy at present. I have written previously that I think that good table selection, and learning how to make good folds were two of the most important lessons that allowed me to jump from 1.5BB to 3.5BB / 100, where I've stayed for a few hundred thousand hands. If I were to add a 3rd factor to this holy triumvirate, it would be learning how to be selectively passive. In my LHE poker education, a pure TAG strategy was always espoused to be the holy grail of playing styles -- merely "calling" was practically a term of reproach. But I feel very strongly that while learning a tight-agressive style can probably help turn a break-even player into a solid 1 or 1.2 BB guy, it's not the be all and end all that most authors seem to declare. (Admittedly, though, most commercial poker books are written for the novice to intermediate player, most of whom would benefit greatly from that strategy, so I'm in no way criticizing the authors themselves.) Take my Las Vegas Jh,8h hand from a few posts ago -- one vocal critic mechanically quoted Ed Miller's SSHE (one of the best introductory-to-intermediate poker books out there, for what it's worth) in declaring my preflop call to be awful. While there was no value in debating the point at the time, in a two-thirds blind structure (e.g. SB is $10 in the 15/30) with 4 terrible players coming in for two bets a piece, calling out of the SB is elementary. The critic also took issue with certain calls throughout the hand, suggesting that raising would have been better.

Anyway, I've written before that I saw immediate returns when I 'graduated' from an 18/9 TAG (in full ring games) to a slightly looser and more aggressive 22/11 guy. But I have also come to appreciate that "raising because you have the best hand", while it may give you the best chance to win that hand, simply isn't always the best strategy to maximize your overall winnings at the end of the day -- and that's the name of the game. This is especially true heads-up (and even moreso when you have position on your opponent.) Maybe I can illustrate with an example or two:

Let's say I have AQo in middle position, and open for a raise. It's folded around to a too-loose SB who completes, and the BB folds. Flop comes A,7,3 rainbow. The SB bets out (into me, the preflop raiser). My classic TAG education tells me to raise, right? After all, I'm pretty certain to have the best hand here, unless the SB hit a set or ragged two pair. But I've just in the past few months begun to occasionally call on every street (assuming SB continues betting into me). Why just call when I've got the best hand? Because I don't want to let a weak ace get away from his hand. It's also not at all uncommon to catch a JT, 66, or some other hopeless holding just keep betting, perhaps hoping to push me off of a lower pocket pair, or some other non-ace holding. If I raise the flop, those crushed holdings probably fold in a heartbeat. Raising the turn is even worse, because you risk losing an Ace with a lower kicker (also ask yourself if you have the stomach to call down if you're 3-bet??). Raising the river is also somewhat dangerous, unless you have a good read on your opponent and can comfortably call or fold to a 3-bet. So I happily just call on every street, and more often than not, I add 3.5 to 4 of my opponents' big bets to my stack (when it probably only would have been 2.5 to 3 had I raised somewhere along the way.) I'm hardly saying this is always the best strategy -- to be sure it's maddening when you passively call all the way, only to have your opponent complete his gutshot or spike a set on the river. But those events (while frustrating) are more than compensated for by the extra bets you pick up the vast majority of the time. Nor is it something I do 100% of the time: just another tool I've found to occasionally employ with good results.

Go ahead and disagree with the above if you would like -- that's what the comment section is for. Just trying to help by discussing a few techniques I found have really helped take my game to the next level, after reaching what I felt were the limits of the traditional TAG strategy promulgated in most commercial books today. Table selection, good folds, and selective passivity are the three most valuable tools I have added to my game.