For a while I never planned on writing a PoohBah post, partially because I had the Verified Coach undertitle and also because I had no idea what I could talk about. Now that Sklansky stripped my title (and every other lazy coach on the forum who loves being self-employed just a bit too much) I got to thinking about what I could write. I'd like to use this opportunity to formally express my gratitude for the twoplustwo forums.
The longer I've used these forums the more I've come to appreciate them. I found 100NL 6max after using these wonderful forums for a few months, and I was the king of FPS, and I wanted to share it with the world (I'm villain in this hand):
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/39...i-beat-253082/. A guy with a few thousand posts called me a decent TAG so I creamed myself a little and went around spewing more money until I found the Heads Up games, a perfect place to cultivate that spew. Fortunately for me, there were a few great players actively posting in the heads up forums, all willing to post honest advice in the dozens of stupid uber-standard threads that I posted here last February till about April of 2009. Eventually I stopped sucking so hard and I could actually think for myself, but this isn't an easy step to accomplish. Somewhere between thinking that 100NL was super aggro and impossibly hard, and watching 5kNL videos thinking that the difference was everyone was 50x more super aggro, I figured out how to actually think about a poker hand.
Now, after a year of studying and playing at a higher level, I know that this is how everyone's poker career needs to begin. They need to go through the process of trial and error. They need to watch themselves make fifteen spewy bluffs and get called a dozen times. And then all fifteen times they need to show the judgemental online world that they made that spewy bluff, and get insulted for doing it, until it finally sticks in their ignorant little minds that you shouldn't check/raise bluff the river against someone who doesn't value bet thinly. Just like everything else good in the world, poker takes a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of failure. For some people this learning process happens on the fly, moving up in the ranks just as quickly as they improve their game enough to beat the next limit. For others, you may spend 2 years watching DeucesCracked videos and 250k hands at SSNL until you really get it. Regardless of how long it might take, every needs to learn how to lose before they can truly understand how to win. Everyone needs to lose 20 buyins to a ****ty reg, everyone needs to let a shortstacker win 8 straight allins, everyone needs to bust their first deposit, and maybe their second one too. Once you've experienced these things you've already gotten better. You've moved one step further in your poker career, because you've lost as much as you thought was possible and you still want more. You're still human, you still have flaws, and you need to improve on them. There's always a next step.
For me, I think that the next step is to leave behind the most valuable educational tool in my poker career. These forums are a spectacular place to learn, evaluate yourself, and improve. For anyone reading this post who 'lurks' or 'doesn't play high enough to comment' or doesn't participate in the forums for any other unmotivated bull**** excuse, get on here and do some ****ing work and improve yourself. I cannot stress enough to beginning players that simply reading these forums is not enough to get where you want to be. Unless you have tons of money to invest in a private coach, you NEED to utilize this perfect opportunity to get input on every decision you're unsure of, because every bad habit is a leak that effects your bottom line and the longer these leaks stay unplugged the harder it is to remove them. Maybe you need to join a HH review group, maybe you need to get coaching, or maybe you just need to PM a bunch of forum regulars and create a skype group where you can chat about poker. There are a million ways that this forum can help you if you spend a few hours looking.
But eventually, once you've exhausted these resources, these forums can no longer help you. There are certain limitations that every MSNL and HSNL regular is aware of to these forums, and if you don't know what I mean then you probably aren't there yet. I encourage all of you to stay here and work hard on your game and help other people too as long as you feel necessary, but this isn't for me anymore. Before I'm done, I'd like to give a special thanks to Isura, nathan, rodolphe, jungleman, DaGrunt, nebuer, cftw, urubu111, StreamlineR, DoubleD, MasterLJ, Pasterbator, rbracco, rumnchess, ShortSharpShock, Aero1441, and probably a ton more people who filled all my old threads with great advice. Even freemoney has helped me a ton, as much as he tilts me
. If it wasn't for all these people, I would suck at poker (more recent posters sorry if I didn't name you, I just skimmed some old threads and listed ppl as I saw them). Even if they weren't as good as they are now, just the simple thought and effort that they all put into my threads was extremely valuable towards improving my thought process in poker.
I know I've left out a lot from this post that could be much better, but I want to start improving as quickly as possible so I'm submitting my first draft and removing twoplustwo from my bookmarks. I'm sure I'll still skim the bigger cash threads from time to time in an attempt to improve my own MSNL game, but I think that to get where I want to be I need to put in twice as much volume and half as much studying. I'm going to keep a blog to keep myself on pace and I'd suggest to anyone else having motivational issues tries the same. Check my profile if you want the link. Again i'd like to thank everyone who's helped me improve over the past year, and I hope I've helped to improve just as many people in my time posting here. If we don't already speak outside of the forums, please do contact me on AIM or Skype (also in my profile) because I haven't met nearly enough of you and everyone I have gotten to know better is an awesome person. I'll also be making my first trip to Vegas this August for my 21st birthday so I hope to meet some of you there in person =). I wish you all the best of luck with your poker careers.
Kevin
P.S. I'll try to be back for Part 2 with some actually decent advice
Two Plus Two
but I'm sure we'll talk plenty on AIM 
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