Nice one!

I recently posted a kind of fun thread in one of the live poker forums on the reasons people lose at live poker.

I got a lot of comments, but one of the things that people didn't pick up on was this one:

I was paying my tribute, as someone who has been playing about as long as antneye (but mostly live) and with a somewhat similar outlook (I was skilled at math when I was in school and was kind of a "natural" when it came to some of the concepts of poker math and therefore spent more time conceptualizing the game than worrying about the razor's edge of math calculations), to the real importance of math in this game.

I still don't think that MOST players need to be completely precise about math. If you understand the basics (estimating pot size, estimating outs, estimating combinations that beat you), and the rake is beatable, that's all you need to get you all the way up to 2/4 or so online or 40/80 live. Your opponents are simply making much bigger mistakes than you are at those levels, and many times the mathematical decisions aren't close anyway.

But one of the things I've learned is that BEING precise and continually learning more math and applying it is important for a different reason even if you aren't going to be playing at a level where it's crucial that your calculations be exact because your opponents are making precise mathematical calculations themselves. And that is, it keeps your head in the game.

For instance, every once in awhile I'll get a little sloppy and fold a flop in a situation where my backdoor outs add enough equity to justify a call. And that's an avoidable mistake-- IF I keep my head in the game and actually do the math, count my outs, and calculate my odds, every time. That's a simple example. But beyond that, it's important in your session reviews to plug your key hands into Stove. Sometimes I find that when I actually calculate someone's range reasonably and plug it in, I payed off someone I absolutely shouldn't have or called where I really didn't have the equity to justify it, because I overvalued my pair outs or didn't give the villain enough credit for a narrow range.

Even for someone like me, who isn't Mr. Poker Math by any stretch of the imagination, there is clearly no substitute for the discipline of doing the math, every single time.

Great post ant.

Interesting, both antneye and lawdude are advocating becoming more precise (working out ranges better, not forgetting about backdoor outs, among other examples). Interesting, because in the last few years I have become much less rigorous in that sense. You think more in categories and approximate fractions than in actual numbers or hand combos. As in a value scale and it's only the turning points between categories that are actually interesting and close to work out in numbers, so why bother with the other.

E.g.: "theoretically he should have about half value hands, quarter FDs and quarter absolute bluffs to make his bet profitable, but I've never seen him bluff, so I fold" as opposed to "He has 24 combos of jacks+, 6 combos of FDs and 3 combos of overcards, which gives me a 12.5% equity, since I'm getting only 7-1, I should fold".

Bella,

I think where you are is a natural place to be, but you can never get there without doing the detail work away from the table. You need to exercise those muscles in order to do what you are saying.

That was pretty much the whole point of my post.

Thanks for the positive feedback guys and gals

Just wanted to say that I resonate with a lot of your post. I played poker all throughout the poker boom but was perfectly satisfied with playing 4/8 and being not as bad as everyone else. When games started getting tougher in 2008-2009, I thought, hmm, maybe I should actually try to play better than I did 6-7 years ago.

My missed opportunities likely number in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Sir, I'm too lazy to learn how to use a hub and to search the how to's can someone please make an ebook with all the information in the index so I can go straight to the point and not have to read all the useless information.

Take the best of 2+2 how to's, the beating heart, and place it in an Ebook with all the excess fat trimmed off. Lets get to the meat an bone... or maybe I'm too lazy to even read that. If you do it, cut me in a few %.

Check out the digest and library from the main forum pages. We can debate whether ALL the best 2+2 threads are there, but there's a ton of information in it.

Nice post. I share a lot of the same behaviors and attitudes you do. I gave up on hand reviews awhile back. I peter-principled my way up to 3/6 and then UIGEA hit and about the same time I had been running bad for a few months, so I cashed out. Inevitably I played again, but it was never the same. Still have 950 on FT (if you can say it still "exists"). I put $100 on merge a year ago which I can't imagine having played more than 5-10K hands since.

Since the shutdown of online poker, my results in live play have flatlined. I guess some of this is variance and a change in the player pool but I also have to take responsibility for some undisciplined play. Limping in with K3s? Never would have done this when I was sharp and in practice - which was easy to accomplish with the high volume of hands logged online.
Good post and a challenge to anyone who has goofed off in the past year or so.