BLOG – A poker headwarp plus strengths and weaknesses

BLOG – A poker headwarp plus strengths and weaknesses

Friday, 10 September 2010

In advance I feel I must apologise for the slightly serious and arguably poncy tone that my blogs have taken over the past week. Less sarcastic diatribes barbed towards the more mockable members of the poker profession, more wordy musings about poker as a game in general. Sorry about that.

I’ve just been really thinking about poker a lot lately. Not in the usual ‘shut your eyes and dream of six-tabling $300/$600 while beautiful women massage your testicles’ way but in the ‘how can I make my game better so that I can six-table $3/$6 while average-looking women massage my testicles’ way.


I blame the following people or websites: ‘iamsweden’, a Two Plus Two poster who is charting his progress to become a nosebleed player by the end of the year. He plays super-LAG and reads hands/situations exceptionally well. The thread features a lot of his analysis on some sick call downs and turning hands into bluffs, etc.


Andrew Brokos for his compelling articles at thinkingpoker.net, a website with a wealth of advanced strategy for making long-term +EV adjustments to your game by taking creative lines and getting inside your opponents’ heads. It’s got me reviewing hands in a totally different way.


Matt ‘mbolt1’ Bolt, protégé of Dusty “leatherass” Schmidt and instructor at DragtheBar.com. His micro-stakes and small stakes videos are great because he plays a sort of… TAGLAG style, whereby he is loose and aggressive 80% of the time but solid and tight 20% of the time. I think ‘solid LAG’ is the best way to describe it if that conveys it at all.
In short, I’m well on the grind. Furthermore I have recently made myself the owner of a 27” LG HDTV which is now plugged into the laptop and ready to accommodate six high resolution PokerStars tables that I can see from miles away. Lovely stuff.


I also read a lot of things – forgive me but I can’t remember where – about the strengths and weaknesses of various styles of play. It got me thinking – what are mine? I think my strength is a kind of fearlessness in that I’m detached from the money and am not afraid to make a very risky bluff if I think my opponent will fold.


This is also a weakness because I’m not a big maths guy and rarely follow up big bluffs with an EV calculation. I also tilt a bit but not as much as I did a few months ago; re-reading The Poker Mindset definitely helped with that. My main weakness is that I really hate folding. I should probably work on that…



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