Quote:
Originally Posted by adios
@shai - thanks for the update. I am curious as to where your play has improved the most. Your win rate seems damn good actually.
Thanks for the compliment. I've really improved in pretty much every aspect of my play, but I would say these are the areas where my play has improved the most.
1) Procedural mistakes
I made far, far too many procedural mistakes my first few hundred hours of play. They got pretty expensive. The worst was in a 2/5 game. I was listening to music in seat 1. Seat 9 opens in EP, I 3 bet him with AK, and he flats. We both have about 2k. Flop comes 432r and he makes a motion that looks like a check. I toss out like 75 bucks for what I think is a C-bet. Dealer deals the turn. Okay. He immediately deals the river. At that point I'm feeling confused and villain quickly turns over Aces. Only about 2-3 seconds have passed since I made the c-bet. I ask the dealer what's going on. Apparently Seat 9 verbalized an all-in and what I thought was a checking motion was just gestural hand movement. Normally the dealer tosses an all-in button to the guy but this didn't happen. My "c-bet" even though it was three green chips was construed as a call. So I lose my stack. Expensive lesson.
Anyway, I don't listen to music anymore and I try to avoid seat 1 as much as possible. I'm also very very careful about memorizing my hole cards (more than once I've thought I had the nut flush but got one of the suits wrong) and clarifying previous action if I'm not completely sure what has happened. I haven't made any procedural mistakes in the last ~300 hours of play. Probably made about 20 in the first 300, most minor but a few quite serious. But I think I have all that behind me. I hope.
2) Reading people / spotting tells
I have gotten pretty damn good at reading when villains are weak, strong, bluffing, whatever, particularly when heads up. I initially thought I would suck at this part of poker because my people skills are not so good but it's really just pattern recognition and most players have patterns, whether they realize it or not. People don't bluff much at this level, but I've gotten pretty good at spotting the rare cases when someone is bluffing. I'd guess when I'm in a spot where fundamentals say I could go either way (for instance, whether to call an all-in or fold), live reads help me make the correct decision about 80% of the time. Some people are harder to read than others but I've encountered nobody who doesn't leak information at least some of the time.
3) Knowing when to bluff
Initially I was bluffing too much. More accurately, I was bluffing about the same frequency I do now, but just doing it in the wrong spots and getting snapped off. I've gotten pretty good at finding those spots in 1/2 where you can launch a huge bluff and actually succeed. I know 1/2 is 90% value and I'm not bluffing often, but once or twice a session I'm able to find a spot where I get a read villain is fairly weak and can get him to release. I feel I'm especially good at knowing when to double barrel, and how to size effectively to get max fold equity without excessive risk.
4) Knowing when to fold strong hands
This one is actually pretty easy but still took me hundreds of hours to build the discipline to actually lay down my set when the diamond draw comes in and villain pushes all in (or w/e). Very few players at this level have a significant bluffing frequency for large bets, especially on the river, and they don't value bet thinly enough. So if I bet KTss on a KT92Jdcdhd board and villain raises (or he switches from check-calling to leading) it's an easy fold against 90% of opponents. Passive players aren't raising worse 2p here, or even KJ, and many won't even raise with a Q. If they raise they probably have a flush, maybe a straight, but no way KT is still good.
5) Being patient
This was hard for me coming from online poker which is so, so much faster. It took me a while to build the discipline to play sufficiently tight even when card dead. It is very tempting when card dead to deviate from the plan and do something like raise ATo UTG, but now I just fold it and move on without a second thought.
6) Optimizing bet sizing
I used to just bet 2/3 pot for pretty much any situation I wanted to bet. I now utilize anywhere from 1/4 psb to 2x psb to AI in different spots and I think it's improved my results a lot for getting more value when I'm ahead and getting folds when I'm not. I'm still working a lot on this one, trying to squeeze every drop of value I can.
The stuff I was already good at like the mathematical aspects I'm still good at but haven't really improved that much. My biggest problem area is probably tilting. I've gotten much much better at not tilting but it's still a concern and has turned some nights that would have been moderate losses into major losses. But I'm aware of how tilt affects me (my aggression goes up) and can usually "reset" myself by taking a break and reminding myself it's all one long session so it doesn't matter if today's session is winning or not.
But I've still got a long way to go! I hope to keep improving as long as I'm playing and never grow complacent.