Poker, in a nutshell

Most of you should know I love the game of poker, I think it's a fascinating sport, a way to see deep inside a person's soul, and for now it's a way that I can pay my rent. I'm a member of this online forum called 2+2, and it's a strategy forum where you post hands and ask advice sort of thing. Well, I just wrote my 1,000th post there, and I wrote a little milestone post, so to speak, and I figured I'd post it here too.

There is most likely terminology some of you may not understand. Feel free to ask questions. There are no stupid questions.

Enjoy:

(Just a little background about myself, in case any one is curious: I'm 22, currently unemployed, graduated with a degree in Film and Writing, started playing poker when I was 15 with AMT in my basement, we taught other high school kids how to play then took their money, played online a bit in college, then Alex went pro so I started to take it a bit more seriously, then Alex staked me for the $5s and here I am. Hope you enjoy what I have to say)

Looking at poker in perspective.
There was a theory I was reading about, this guy ran a study trying to see how people think about the future and the present and using money as a need. So if I asked you if you wanted 50 dollars or 60 dollars, you would obviously say 60. Where it gets fun is putting in time as a way to measure value. Would you rather have 50 dollars now or 60 dollars in a month. People generally tend to want the 50 dollars now because now is usually seen as better than in the future. But what if I said 50 dollars in 12 months or 60 dollars in 13 months. The man's study found that people were willing to wait the extra month and hold out for the 60. It's an interesting phenomenon, really. Look at what we value and time, you can see the obvious contradiction we have. The average person is willing to wait 13 months for 60 dollars as opposed to 12 months for 50, but imagine that actually happening, and then getting to the now vs. in 1 month from now, people will want the 50 dollars now.

Now I want to apply this to poker. This is the exact rationale behind playing tight early on and loose later in a SnG. If I gave you this situation:

1st hand of the game, 1500 chips, UTG with KK. Would you shove? Absolutely not. That would be seen as a vast overexageration and most of the time (you'll still get called a lot by junk in lower levels obviously) you're losing value by doing this.

But let's say we're 4 handed, at the bubble and we have 1500 UTG/CO, blinds at 100/200 with KK. This is a clear shove (I guess you can make the case that sometimes you want to vary it up and limp or whatever, but it's a relatively clear shove). We have the same hand, in the same (relatively) position and the same stack. But what's happened? Because the blinds got higher, we can now shove effeciently.

This concept was one of the hardest I had to accept getting through SnGs, and that's the value of a chip. I was trying to explain to my room mate once about blinds, and how the % of your stack is "forced money" in the pot and that amount rises over time. Since that % rises, we have to be willing to play more hands in order to win more hands and now get blinded out. Then explaining this further to the same room mate, applying it to % of total chips in the game. So there only become X number of blinds in the game, and when that value decreases, which it does as the blinds increase, then the value of the chips in play, or "forced money" become more valuable.

n00b training
I wanna go over a few tendencies I know I fell into early on in my poker playing career, and hopefully some of you can see them and stop them from happening before it's too late.

1) Reaching the 3000 chip milestone: What I love about SnGs that most people don't really get is that they are completely structured. There are only 13,500 chips in play that you can get, regardless of blinds, and sometimes we let our chip stacks get in the way of making +EV plays. Take for example, what's happened to all of us at every buy in level at least once in our careers: You get AA on the FIRST HAND! Someone raises, someone else reraises and you're just like, HELL YEAH, I SHOVE. You shove in so emphatically and then BAM, someone calls with KK. Now after just the 1st hand you've reached the illustrious 3,000 chip mark. Something happens to us at this point. We either think, "well I can coast to the money" or "now I can be a bully." Both of these thoughts are true, but thinking them and not taking perspective into play will get us in a lot of trouble.

2) Having 3000 chips does NOT prove anything. I can't tell you how many I've been too cocky with a big chip stack and then bubbled. All you can do is think back to how you were either too stingy or too lenient with your chips. I've snuck into the money with 2,000 chips before, gotten heads up and won before. I've also had 7,000 chips on the bubble and not made the money. You have to NOT think ahead. Think about each hand as it plays out. Every single hand should have its own thought process. Each hand where you're faced to either put in chips or not put in chips should require you to look at everyone elses stack, the blinds, assigned set of ranges for each player and then a decision, hopefully before you time out.

3) "Well he sucks, I MUST have him beat!" This mentality is for those of us who like to bang our heads against the walls of our homes and hope that money comes out, aka playing $2-$10 SnGs. Then playing turbos just means banging your head against the wall harder and faster. I can't tell you how many times I have a note on someone that reads "sux die" and then somehow he gets Kings. It just happens. Even idiots get big hands. DON'T LET IT TILT YOU. It's going to happen. You just have to take reassurance in the fact that at the end of the day, he's taking edges that are -eV. But Asher, the fish keep beating me! I know. But there's math to this game too, which is something that every donk doesn't understand. QQ will beat JJ 90% of the time, but it will also lose 10% of the time. It just seems that the 10% happens more because it hurts so damn much. I guarantee that you're winning 90% of the time, you just don't realize it. This isn't a variance thing, this is a mentality thing, you can't doubt yourself into thinking that you have to loosen up or start playing garbage just because they are. Keep playing your game. You'll beat them long run. At least, we have to keep telling ourselves that in order to not commit sepaku.

4) Every little chip counts -- One big problem I think you can run in to a lot is the "well it's not for much of my stack, so I'll just call this small raise with nothing" mentality. You have to be able to look ahead past the hand. Here's a hand I played, that in the grand scheme of the SnG didn't mean much or do anything, but I wanna use it as an example.

Full Tilt Poker $6 + $0.50 No Limit Hold'em Tournament - t20/t40 Blinds - 9 players - View hand 14341
The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked.com

MP2: t1530 M = 25.50
CO: t1380 M = 23
BTN: t1755 M = 29.25
Hero (SB): t1695 M = 28.25
BB: t1470 M = 24.50
UTG: t1500 M = 25
UTG+1: t1320 M = 22
UTG+2: t1500 M = 25
MP1: t1350 M = 22.50

Pre Flop: (t60) Hero is SB with 9 T
1 fold, UTG+1 calls t40, 5 folds, Hero calls t20, BB checks

Flop: (t120) 3 K T (3 players)
Hero checks, BB checks, UTG+1 checks

Turn: (t120) 3 (3 players)
Hero bets t100, BB folds, UTG+1 calls t100

River: (t320) J (2 players)
Hero checks, UTG+1 checks


Random, pretty early, I figured I'd stab at the turn and see if my pair held by the river. For some reason, he called me with A high. Ok, not huge, but look at where we are after the hand. I have 1875 and he has 1180. At this blind level, he's fine, but in a turbo, blinds are going to be raising to 25/50, where a standard 3x raise will be more than 10% of his stack. Then he starts getting himself into tougher situations. Meanwhile, I'm sitting with a nice 1800+ stack and ready for the higher blinds. It's a small change, but if he hadn't limped the hand at all to begin with, (which is a CLEAR fold pf, with A6o in MP) he'd be in a better situation to progress in the SnG. It's a little thing, but if you find hands like this on a consistent basis, they add up.

5) "Oh, I know what tilting means, I'm ok to play": This is probably the worst kind of mentality I'm going to talk about. The psychology of poker is something I could probably go on and on about, but knowing when NOT to play is the hardest thing to learn. Knowing when you play optimally takes a lot of practice, and it takes a lot of downswings. Figuring out time of day, how many tables, what music to listen to, what chair to sit in, what shorts to wear, what to drink, what to eat, how to sit, to be on AIM, to have 2+2 open, to have any internet open at all, watch a movie, watch some TV. I'm sure you don't think about all these things on a day to day, hour to hour or minute by minute basis, but at some point in time you should take into consideration every single possible distraction you can have and look at literally every aspect of what your game is. I have literally thought about every single one of those things, and have different routines for different flows. I can have a TV show on to keep me focused, sometimes I need music, sometimes I have 2+2 open, it all depends on how I'm feeling.

Getting to understand your emotions how they relate to poker is the key. Getting frustrated about poker and then being in a bad mood will almost certainly lead to more bad poker playing. Knowing when to stop, take a break, refocus, and then get back is the hardest part. And really truthfully, you won't learn how to do it until you fail at it. It takes a big downswing to make you question your routine and question your ability to control your emotions before you can really take a step back and say, "ok, this is what I'm doing wrong and this is how I'm going to correct it."

What to do with emotion
That first big downswing is going to hurt. It's going to feel like you forgot how to play poker. But everyone goes through it (except Tatta, but whatever). Look at my graph (movieman2g) and you'll see my November. I'm gonna tell you how I got out of it, and I haven't told anyone else this before, but at one point, I was literally down to $7 in my account. I said, F it, let's play one more. So I played a $6, cashed, then said, well you know what, let's see if this works out. So I played an $11. Cashed again. So I played a $22. Cashed again. At this point, I said, ok, time to stop, and I grinded the 2s until I built up my roll to play the 6s and now my roll is healthy and steady. But I had to hit rock bottom before I could question every part of my game in order to know that I had weaknesses. Poker isn't a game just about luck or reads or math. It's more of a self-mental game than any other sport. Understanding that you will fail most of the time and learning to deal with it is part of the game.

Take everything I have to say with perspective. These are things that I've noticed from myself, my room mate (blouk), my friends (AMT) and from posting on the forum. 2+2 is probably the best guide you can use to improve your game, so if you're wondering about making a commitment to the forum, and you have the time, do it.

I'll end my post with a quote from Anthony Holden, a poker old timer. This quote got me through a lot of hard times, not just in poker, and is a big reason I've pursued poker as much as I have in my life so far.

"Whether he likes it or not, a man's character is stripped at the poker table; if the other players read him better than he does, he has only himself to blame. Unless he is both able and prepared to see himself as others do, flaws and all, he will be a loser in cards, as in life."