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.





Friday, 31 May 2013

2.5k hands so far

Super small sample, break even overall.

I have a habit when playing after a break to fight for too many pots, and this showed itself again in two different forms.
1/ I recklessly 5-bet shoved A2o against an aggressive late position opener who 4-bet from the button. I was convinced in terms of game flow and given his wide steal range that he would be 4-betting light in that spot quite often plus I had a blocker. He did call though and I was dominated.

The trouble with 5-bet shoving light is that the odds we're laying ourself aren't that good. If I have 25% equity against a calling range (true in this case) and I'm risking two and a half times the pot then I need a large percentage of his 4-bet range to fold for it to become profitable (I think it's around 40%). This sounds possible but pretty unlikely.

2/ I made a call with ace high on a double paired board against an aggressive fish. The board played out in a way that it counter-fit all of his low pairs and all of the draws missed. So I decided to play bluff catcher.

I can name plenty of times in the past when this might have been a reasonable call against certain opponents and I guess I threw this guy in with the same player type. The problem was I had very few hands on him. He was certainly a fish (weird bet sizing plus less than full stack) but I don't think I had enough hands to reliably make an ace high call. He could have turned out to be a really passive fish who only bets the nuts (which he had in this case).

Other than these two big mistakes I think I've played pretty solidly. Enough of my opponents were making errors against me that I'm pretty confident that I can beat this limit providing I can cut out mistakes like the above.

I can sense that some of my sharpness is returning with time and hands and I think that I will make fewer mistakes as time goes on. And really this is the essence of poker; the challenge is to reach a standard where the very best players at your limit are making no fewer mistakes than you are. GL






No comments:

Post a Comment