Solid Session

Just played a good session, felt that I played very solidly without any huge mistakes. The last few times I've played I've made a concerted effort to focus entirely on my opponent's range at each stage in the hand. For a while I was trying too hard to balance my own actions. Unfortunately this sometimes meant that I was thinking too much about my own hand strength rather than villain's range, leading to bluffing in spots that were probably not good for doing so and betting in spots where there was no value (thereby unnecessarily turning my hand into a bluff at times). Now that I've returned focus to range reading, things have started going pretty well. That isn't to say that I'm not doing things to improve my balance in certain situations, I'll sometimes see spots that look good for a raise with hands that are slightly too weak to call and this has been going well. But overall my strategy has returned to a more fundamental outlook and it's helped me to play better.

I've been a member of Cardrunners for a long time and learned a lot from the videos there. A Rush player called Alvin Lau has been doing some research using a large database of players. It appears from his research that the most optimal style in Full Ring Rush poker has a VP$IP of around 10-13%. That is not to say it's impossible to make other styles work if you're good but I was pleased to hear this evidence being a player myself who sits around 13%. His philosophy is that its not wrong to be a nit if you're a good one. He has a Rush win rate of 3BB/100 over 300k hands at $1/$2 playing 12% of hands so he should know!

For my next post Im going to do something a bit different I think and try and do a little bit of a strategy post on river play. Until this year I always had trouble distinguishing between a value bet and a bluff and bluff catchers but now it makes complete sense for some reason. I'm going to dig out some hands from my database and be very critical of my river play and try and explain the difference between bluffing and value betting and see where I got it right and wrong.