http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=140

BW -

Your strategy posts are more valuable than the rest of the strat posts on the whole of 2+2 combined. They are so good that I wish you'd stop. Awesome results though, gl in the future.

boywonder, can you please describe some specific things i can do to prevent my emotional conditioning from getting worse in a session?

one you mentioned is to take a breath before a big decision. what can i do to remain stable throughout the many smaller decisions throughout the session. one of my problems is that when my emotional condition starts to worsen, there will be a disconnect from my fingers and my brain. so when i know i should fold, i'll call or even worse raise. do you meditate? yoga? any books worth reading that could help?

thanks

You say that the results of Isildur's demise were inevitable but I disagree. Isildur was doing fine until the cardrunners guys started teaming up against him. Even though he might lose 2 million to PA/whatever today , he can possibly regain it over time . But PA, CTS and Hastings + whoever basically discussed everything together and even sold pieces of them self to each other wihle playing against Isildur. That's how the corporation beat Andy Beal as well. When you are up against a bunch of people that share your leaks/tendencies then you are at a huge disadvantage no matter how skilled you are and too bad that most of the poker community strutured this way.

Not really anymore, I move up when I feel that it's time, and it's hard to quantify why I feel that but at some point I usually start opening another table of a higher limit, then another, and in usually 4 to 5 days all my tables are of that limit, and I don't go back down. That's been the way I've done it through every limit between 50 and 1000 NL.

Because of the bumhunting aspect of the game the 10-20 to 25-50 games run much more seldom, or when they do they are centered around a certain player and the wait lists can be tricky. These days, 5-10 is a sweetspot where the stakes are significant, they don't depend primarily on blind players under the age of 12, and there is an acceptable amount of action throughout all the sites.

In 2010 however, I will be making my way through some of the higher stakes and see how it goes. The impression I have of 10 - 20 is that the players are exactly the same as the 5 - 10 players except there is a poor player sitting at the table, but I could be wrong.

I am guessing that you are referencing what I have discussed earlier:

The absolute most important thing when faced with a big decision, is to first breathe and relax for a couple of seconds.

Have you ever noticed when you get sucked into a hand? Like you have an overpair and you get raised on the turn, you know you´re beat, and beofre you know it you have called anyway? Or what i call the bluff-vortex, when you start with small flop raise, and before you know it you have fired three barrels and you´re all in and get snapcalled by the nuts? What the hell just happened? A 200 bb pot lost out of nowhere!!? If, at any point, you would have just stepped back, taken a breath and realized how little sense your line makes or how narrow his range must be, you would have saved a stack. When you look at it in retrospect, it is very clear to you. This alludes to my earlier point; most of you guys are fine when it comes to the technical aspects of the game, but you need to hone some of the mental and emotional ones.

The reason this happens to you is that you are, at the time of the hand, not in the hand. You are in the previous hand. Or at showdown. Wether you are in the future or the past, you are certainly not in the present. How else would you explain this? You are obviously not raecting to this situation. You are reacting to a previous one, or a percieved one, or a percieved future one.

I do meditate, and a purpose of meditation is to allow you to train on being focused on the here and now, this session, this hand, this opponent, this street, this action.

gl boywonder hopefully to be seeing you chrushing the 2550 games running this name next year

Perhaps you are right and i am not disagreeing with any of this, but the inevitability might have lied in the fact that sooner or later a group of dedicated, smart and experienced players would do to two things that they have a right to which is sharing action and discussing hands. Trust me, I rooted for Isildur1 just like everybody else, and if this is so obvious to everybody then it must have been obvious to him as well, at the time. Yet he continued to play. I hope and think that he will come back wiser, and it will be interesting to follow him the second time around.

serious post:

Barry Greenstein says in his book specifically how important "sexual wellness" is to poker. The idea is that with the sexual energy drained from your mind, you can think more clearly and you can focus more on making the best decisions.

Wondering what your thoughts are on this (obviously in very general terms) and also how important you would say your relationship with your fiance is to your poker game. Have to imagine that the stability in your graphs has a lot to do with stability in your life and relationships going far back.

Thanks.

It was nice to be up 100 K

Poker does not owe any of us anything, and I am constantly surprised by how many of us act as if though we were some type of supermen doing something superimportant and that we should be endlessly rewarded for it and if not, scold the earth and damn all kittens to hell.
In the end, most of us are a bunch of people that got very lucky to be at the right place, at the right time, and if nothing else we should stay humble about this. At least this goes for the great majority of the mid and high stakes community in my small experience.

I start with imbalances, anything that I think looks weird or out of the norm. An example is a post from one of the other threads:


Quote:
Boywonder:
...realize that when they bet the turn, because of this manner of pot control that is so integral to their overall game plan, they will often have either air, a marginal hand or a monster. Exploit this lack of balance in their play

Question from Jack O Clubs:
I'm not trying to troll or quote mine but this makes no sense to me.
"air, a marginal hand or a monster" sounds like a well balanced range to me.


It´s actually not that well balanced since it rarely includes good but not great hands like top pair second kicker. It actually becomes polarized between air and nuts, since most of these guys are not confident enough to continue to a checkraise w e.g third pair or second pair. So the hands become polarized to either hands they can continue with always or never. I am not used to discussing strategy, hope I made this clear.

how many % of players at 1/2 to 3/6 do you think actually have a solid postflop gave that goes all the way through the river.

There is profound truth in this. Great post!

so sick, great achievement OP, grats!

really this