Passing The Test But Failing the Class
Teach an old DOGMA New Tricks.
An Ace and A Race...
Paper or Plastic-Cash verses Chips
When you lose, you lose money, when you win, you lose respect for money. Yet too much respect for money makes you a bad player.... I must be a great player because I have lost total respect for money- and now I know why.
I treat cash game chips like tournament chips... I thought making the change from limit to NLH was apples to oranges, well, so is live cash verses tournament, where you have an infinite verses finite amount of chips to work with. On any given Friday night, people come to gamble in a cash game and they will call you down with ace high..
RAISE or FOLD- If you call, you are accepting someone else's odds.
Doyle's Super System says AK is his best hand...because it's easy to let it go. It is after all, a drawing hand, not a made one. In position, I'll almost always make a continuation bet, if the flop is low ball, and hardly ever check.
Being normal. It is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful and unimaginative. Ask your mother. Normal is the setting on her washing machine. Normal isn't a virtue. It denotes a lack of poker courage. You have to be Madonna, constantly reinventing yourself. Otherwise, it’s a vast, conforming suburb of the soul. You don’t want to be normal. Normal people spend their lives avoiding tense situation, Poker Playahs spend their lives getting into them. The whole upshot of NLH is that it be a perpetual crisis that you create. The Phish is the last one to know it is in the ocean. Phush swim in it. Players surf on it. Failure to plan creates crisis in RL (Real Life) In NLH, planning for crisis eliminates failure.
This is a Poker Mini-Satori- You abhor monotony and constancy, equating them, in your mind, with death. Seek upheaval, drama, and change.God may play dice with the universe,, but this ain’t no metaphysical crap shoot, it’s NLH. If you want to have “fun” then spin the wheel of fortune, phone a friend, buy a vowel, and get voted off the island. Deal or No Deal. If you want an “experience”, play NLH. It’s not a sport, it’s a concussion! Good NLH poker is not a "A-ha" experience, it is more of a "holy-shit" experience.
Suited And Booted
When I started playing NLH, the two expressions I said constantly, were, "I don't believe it!" and "...but they were suited". I stopped saying the last one, but it is still unbelievable, like losing with Quads to a straight flush online...that hurts-ouch!"- Ed Reif
Most playahs are experience rich and technique poor. Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again. Someday, this blog will start to read like one long typographical error, and you come away thinking, “From now on, I'll connect the dots my own way”. 'It’s like football - if you don't wear a helmet and pads, you're going to get hurt.. This blog is your equipment. It is a contact sport, and the more contact you have with other players, the more you will win.
You simply can’t play a solid, safe game. Anyone who plays poker within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. You have to get in there and gamble.. Aggression makes you money. And the trouble with NLH is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more. Poker very simply, rewards aggression. Aggression is the main source of energy for the NL playah.. NLH is about aggression and domination- it’s a playah’s only redeeming qualities. When everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough. Due to the effect of community cards, hold'em is a game of "domination. A hand is dominated if it has 3 or fewer outs against another, like AQ against AK.
The price of aggression, however, is not cheap. You have to be willing to lose in order to win. Aggression causes trouble. The trouble is you must use extreme self-discipline. If you cannot obey yourself you will be commanded by someone else’s play You cannot control the luck factor, but skill is something over which you have control, and you have the power to gain yet greater skill by becoming a Playah. A playah is just looking for opportunities, not guarantees. Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t amateur hour, this is gambling. All of life is risk exercise. It’s the only way to live more freely and interesting. Dream with your eyes open.
Aggression causes pressure and pressure makes diamonds and diamonds last forever--- It creates the mutant ability to do the impossible, win consistently at NLH. You deserve to win consistently, and the minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for. But you don’t get what you deserve in poker, you get what you negotiate, and you better be good at negotiating risk.
In NLH, betting is far better than calling. That’s aggression. When you bet, you can win if you have the better hand or if your opponent folds. If you call, you can only win if you have your opponent beaten. If you bet, you determine the bet size. You determine the pot odds. If you call, you are accepting someone else's odds.
If you bet, you force people to pay you off when you have a good hand. If you are a caller, you have to hope someone else will willingly pay you off. The importance of aggression is why tight-passive players can win a lot more at Limit than No-Limit. If you were arrested for aggression would there be enough evidence for the poker police to convict you?
The gambling world is a kind of gambling kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell "Poker" with the wrong blocks.. You got “T” testosterone, that’s good, you’re gonna want that. You got “A”, aggression , that's even better. You're gonna want and need that too.
You can’t spell danger without anger, and every NLH needs to feel dangerous.But any two year old kid can throw a fit! NLH is about controlling that aggression , harnessing that aggression into a series of wins. Only people who die very young learn all they really need to know in kindergarten.
The antidote to anger is patience, and as we already know: infinite patience brings immediate results to your game. Yet the opposite of patience is aggression. We have this paradox. We are learning that NLH is more subtle and multiple than conventional 'either-or' limits have allowed. Our imaginations have some catching up to do. The power not of positive thinking but paradoxical thinking. The nearer you are to paradox, the nearer you are to beating the game. A Playah Passes The Test But Fails The Class---It's time for New AmeriCON Poker:
The Power Of New Americon Poker—the language of betting, a slang that rolls up its sleeves, spits in the street, screams strength possibly more than any other and gets the work done. Tells Don’t Tell – People Do with the language of their betting. Poker is a game of partial information and the language of betting "last in" is information dominance.Making a bet that leaves no option available to the opponent other than to call is asymmetrical warfare. It disarms their can of whoop ass-- deep stack arsenal. Hands which are ok to try and re-steal from a loose aggressive player are frequently horrible hands to call that final bet with. No one likes calling big all-ins with hands like 88 or A-10 regardless of how sure they are that a player is stealing from them.
The Power of New Americon Poker is about being the last in the pot. It too can be an extremely effective way of accumulating chips in spite of your hole cards, not because of them. Lights Out Poker is about playing 'in the dark': betting that your opponents DON'T have the cards rather than that they do.