Welcome

Hello all, welcome to my online poker blog.

I've been playing on and off for a decade after being introduced by a friend.

I played regularly for a few years during the poker boom and had a decent record at the micros, particularly Rush and Zoom No Limit Hold'em games (here's one of my graphs).

Around 2012 I began a new career which involved immersing myself completely in study in my spare time, so I had little to no time for poker. However recently this burden has eased and so I have been gradually dipping back in.

I'm an amateur player who still hopes to some day beat the rake.





Wednesday 24 March 2010

Improving my SNG play

I still want my primary form of poker to be HUSNG (at least until I'm rolled to play HU cash - which will likely never happen truthfully) but while playing those games t'other night it really annoyed me how poorly I played and whenever that happens I usually put some study into improving that facet of my game. Continuing study of HU play should keep my post flop game decent so that providing I play solid starting hands but increase my risk aversion in FRSNG I should be able to earn chips at low blinds. It's the high blinds where I think I struggle the most though. So I'm going to use the cardrunners discount and join stoxpoker for a while because they have a sng course which I'd like to make use of. I have a book "secrets of sit'n'gos" by Phil Shaw which I can read and then use as a reference; and I have also found a free ICM quiz called ICM Trainer (that is apparently more helpful than the one in sngwiz - which I already own). You can find it over at www.pokerstrategy.com. The reason it is supposed to be more helpful is that it uses approximated equilibrium results. It makes so much sense to me to start by getting a really good feel of semi-optimal strategy and only then deviate according to villain tendencies. Learn to walk before we run...
I'm aware that this goes against my previous assertion that I was going to specialise in HUSNG only but I didn't mean I want to play these games exclusively. I'd love to be able to turn some positive ROI in micro stakes stts and sngmtts - because I enjoy playing them! So I'll try and maintain HUSNG as my bread and butter game and finish this mini course on the side so that I can autopilot sngs in the background when I have my two monitors set up. Wish me luck, ICM is not easy to calculate during play so I need to do a lot of hard work to improve my feel for it. GL all

EDIT: Just spent 30mins or so with ICM Trainer - awesome free tool!! It's very customizable. At first I just started doing random situations, much like real life. I don't think this is the optimal way to use the tool. I think we should practise different specific situations with enough variation to allow the mind to pick up patterns. Once we've learned enough of these, and the sorts of ranges people should be using in these situations we can broaden our approach. Anyway, I think with a practise routine and using this for 20-30 mins most days for a few months my ICM should easily then be good enough for the micros.

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