The thing I notice with action players and straddle pots that makes them unique, even when taking shallow stacks into account, is the greatly increased amount of air in the straddle defender's range, both preflop and after the flop.

For starters, if this wasn't a straddle pot and UTG was limp/calling or defending a blind, I think that there would be less unsuited junk in his range.

In all three cases--straddle, limp/call, and blind defense, his type is often going to play the suited high/low junk like K3s, Q4s and T5s. But only on their straddle is where I've caught them with hands like K3o, Q4o and T5o.

That's a lot of added air combos on the straddle, many with no heart, and you're not always going to see them fold air on the flop in cases where they should, because straddle defense is a pissing contest with them--okay I called your c-bet, now if you check turn I bet river.

With that hypothesis, I could check the turn and try to bluffcatch the river with my ace high, but I'm going to hate a lot of river cards--though I know I block some straights with my T. I could try to bomb the pot on the river if he checks, like you suggest, but I just see him betting the river a lot if I check back the turn.

If he bets a non-ace river, shoving over him is no good. Say he bets $60 on a non-ace river and I shove over him. He has to call only $80 to make $388.

I put in a smallish $50 bet on the turn, just targeting his weak pairs, junk hands that could pair up on the river, and charging some of one heart hands, and trying to keep my hand face down. He asks me if I have a set of Jacks, and eventually he folds.

My weakness here is that I don't have an exciting plan for the river, other than checking behind or folding to a bet.

Your c/b/b line is intriguing, but again I think he's betting the turn if I check back the flop. However, a shove over his turn bet of $30 would have him calling $140 to make $388. Interesting, but I think it's still a little too risky compared to my b/b/f line that garnered the same sized pot from his fold on turn.

I think my main point is that sometimes on boards like this you're going to end up with cards that have you with no equity and just fairly unprofitable b/f spots basically. Like hes going to call your turn bet A LOT, then what? You're in a stupid spot on the river imo. Likewise if he just jams the turn ok easy fold but now we've put in 2 bets postflop with literally zero equity, although I do agree it is 'a plan'.

Like even if we had the 10h I'd be happy to barrel here, but I dunno. Def some merit to your line obviously and I think since we're so unlikely to get exploited maybe it is just a bet on the turn. This just seems like a case where even tons of his air is going to keep peeling if he has like Ahx or even Khx sometimes, but I guess like full potting/overbetting turn does fold out a bunch of that, but we're ahead of so much of that. I dunno, maybe you're right. This is why I stick to PLO

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I only made it 4 hours yesterday. I'm still running bad.

I ran AA into T8 on a T7JA3 board.

I b/b/b, ending with a bet of $50 on the river, and I paid off a raise to $150. It would be hard to think of a spot where I wouldn't pay out.

Nice hand sir.

Bally's: 4 hours:
(-$304)

Thanks nwolfe!

Very solid and clear-eyed advice. When he calls turn with a single high heart, my plan goes weak in the knees; pretty much, unless I pick up an ace. I think this might be a spot where his range is so wide that you can't cover it with one line.

“Everybody will eventually run worse than they thought was possible. The difference between a winner and a loser is that the latter thinks they do not deserve it.”

- Irieguy

"If you let it, no-limit hold 'em will torture you in nearly every way imaginable. Eventually you'll hit a stretch, weeks maybe, where you'll lose every single all-in pot, whether you get it in good or bad. You'll run the biggest bluff of your life and some guy will snap-call with king-high--and win--and you'll sit stupified, wondering how he could have made that call. Then he'll say he misread his hand and thought he had a straight. 'Sorry about that,' he'll say, as he takes a full five minutes to stack all of your money."

-Ed Miller

Same thing happened yesterday as did the day before, except that my set was 8s instead of aces. A professional player in this spot would not let out a long string of expletives, curse his luck, and ragequit after 2 hours. I did all of these things. My study hours today will focus on mental game stuff.

Bally's: 2 hours:
(-$183)

Your mindset may not be perfect, but I've got the impression that it's a lot better than the average 1/2 player already, Suited. Good that you are working on improving it though!

Thanks guys! I did successfully fight a fleeting impulse to lash out at miscellaneous pieces of furniture.

I took the day off and visited the Gambler's General Store in search of Jared Tendler's The Mental Game of Poker, but they were sold out of it. Instead, I found a book called The Poker Mindset by Ian Taylor and Matthew Hilger. It was stuck spine-in at the bottom of a $2 clearance rack; not an auspicious place to be, but I checked the reviews for the book online and they were pretty good. Jesus gave it five stars.



I'll spend a few hours with it today.

Most of these people are a lot smarter than me.

That's the recurring thought I have when I'm reading novels from some of my favorite literary writers: Douglas Coupland and David Mitchell being the two I have in mind. Other of my favorites, like Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace, are kind enough to dumb down the majority of their characters, so I don't feel so inadequate when I'm reading them.

With the great books, I get so into the characters that it rarely occurs to me that they've all been made up by just one man or woman who is both smarter and a better writer than me. It's a selection bias: I'm only reading their stuff because they're so brilliant and successful, and their characters are extensions of that. There's no need to be so jealous of their impossibly glib and witty characters. These all spring from top of the line professional writers. It's much like playing session after session against Jungleman, if he was dressed in a new disguise for each match, and wondering why my heads-up game is so awful.

Anyways, this is just the preamble to a long post that will start with a monologue from a character in a book by David Mitchell, who wrote Cloud Atlas and a bunch of other great books. But for now it's off to Bally's and their freeroll.

I've had enough of Bally's for a while. I'll try the Orleans for a day.

Bally's: 6.5 hours: (Bally's Freeroll +$185)
+$60

i am also behind on this bread, but i legit lol'd, let the fart free brother

Thanks tbh! Here's a post that's a bit longer.


I was adopted by middle-class parents in Surrey, I went to a good school. I got a job in a city firm. I was twenty-two and I was taking Prozac for breakfast. I had my very own shrink. I wince to think of the money I paid him to tell me what the matter was. When I told him I'd been adopted his eyes lit up! He'd done his Ph.D. in adopted kids. But I discovered the answer myself in the end. I had stopped taking plunges. I don't mean risks: I mean plunges, the uprooting and throwing of oneself into something entirely new.

Now I live like this, losing the battle against a battery of deadlines--especially financial ones--but at least they are deadlines of my own choosing, there because I plunged myself into something again. It's not always an easy way to live. Independence and insecurity hobble together in my three-legged race. Jim--my adopted dad--tells me this is a choice I made, and that I shouldn't ask for sympathy. And that's true. But why did I make that choice? That's what I wonder about. Because I am me, is the answer. But that just postpones the question. Why am I me?

-David Mitchell
ghostwritten (novel)


I was born almost exactly 9 months after the Woodstock concert in New York, then I was promptly put up for adoption in Connecticut. I have little doubt that I was conceived by persons unknown in a haze of mud, drinking, drugs and music. Abortion would not become legal in my home state until three years after I was born, so I might have some faint grounds for having an opinion on that matter, but only from the personal standpoint of having been unwanted but not aborted, and possibly not aborted because of the adverse legal situation at the time.

From a personal standpoint then: before I was born, the first 13 billion years in the life of this Universe passed behind me in a flash--I don't remember any of it, and neither do you--so I suspect that having been aborted, I could have made it another 13 trillion years without hardly batting an eye, maybe then to see my consciousness coalesce as a sentient rock pondering in the light of a dying sun near the center of a rare and diminishing galaxy 100 billion light years from here.

Unlike Mitchell's young British character, I don't use the 'adoptive' adjective when I think of my parents. I just think of them as my parents. That may be a function of my parents having made sure to tell me all about my adoption back when I was so young that as far as I'm concerned, I've always known it--and I have memories that go back into my earliest toddler years, so they told me about it damn early.

There was also a bit about them being my mom and dad effectively, and that their being able to choose me didn't do anything to change that designation. I bought into that line at the time, and I still do, though I was actually their second choice. The first boy they adopted died of kidney failure while he was still a baby. The adoption agency then gave me to them, as a store credit.

For the first month of my life, I was alone. I'll never know how often the agency caregivers picked me up and held me, but when my parents got to me I was sporting a flattened dent on the right side of my soft baby head from lying down on my side for so long. The dent eventually popped back out, as far as I can tell, but to this day I still prefer sleep on my right side.

If you've read enough of this blog, you'll know by now that I don't mind being alone. All that may have to do with me coming to terms with my first month in this world, thinking: I don't know much about this new place, but it looks like I'm going to be alone in it for most of the time. Better get used to it.

The only thing I know about my birth mother is that she gave me the same name as my dead adoptive brother; not on purpose, obviously. My parents changed my name, and I don't blame them for it.

I don't know anything about my ethnicity. On the surface, I'm as white as Macaulay Culkin or Ken Jennings, but I also have big lips and a high protruding butt, so I could have some African blood in me. I'm aware that I could do the ancestry.com thing any time I want, but I don't think that it's wise in this era of looming fascism to be submitting my genetic fingerprint into an easily indexed database.

What's the point? There's no point other than to recognize that I have no roots. I have no legacy to live up to or to rebel against. And I've never been interested in seeking out a legacy. All this makes it easier for me to throw everything behind me and to start a new life, completely on my own terms.

I prefer your blog over a blog from any of the writers you mentioned, Suited.

Could you pay someone to submit your DNA in their name? If it's not linked to your name what's the harm? Plus if some black suits hijack your middle man at least you know you gotta stay away from hospitals.

I'm honored by that, Sheep!

Part of me, I think, prefers to hold on to my quantum ethnicity, while another part just can't be arsed to do the detective work.

Speaking of CBA: This week's hours goal--try to make both the Flamingo and the Bally's freerolls.

To do that, I'll need to play 6 hour days at the Flamingo today, tomorrow and Sunday. Then I'll want to play 6 hours each at Bally's on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, with another 2 hours to play on Saturday before the freeroll.

Bally's gives more chips per hours played. The minimum tournament stack is $5k at 12 hours, increasing to $8k at 15 hours, then $12k at 20 hours played within their two-week cycle. The stack per time increases continue after that to the point where some leather-assed regs start with $50k+ chips. The average starting stack at the last tourney was a surprisingly large $15.5k, but there were still enough minimum $5K stacks present to make a 20 hour, $12k stack ideal (for me, anyways) to make it through the early bubble.

He’s a glutton for punishment lol

It's been a while, for a certain definition of while.

Not sure what I just got into but in.

Hi Da_Nit. Welcome!

It's a blog. Most days I write about trying to learn the live Las Vegas poker game as well as make a living from it while I'm learning. Sometimes I tell long, bizarre stories from my the past, similar to this one. Sometimes I ponder the nature of the universe, from either a highbrow perspective or in the crudest terms possible. My readers like to jump in and offer advice, encouragement and remonstrances. All of these are welcome.

The mindset work seems to be kicking in all right. Yesterday at the Flamingo I sat down to what one BBVer calls "intense bursts of beats" and I found myself down $375 just shy of the 2 hours into the session.

My bad habit in this spot is to get up and ragequit.



This is unacceptable. On one hand, I shouldn't play while I'm tilted; but on the other hand, I'm killing my weekly hours, and that's costing real money. In the past I had tried getting up and walking it off for 30 minutes or so, but I all that that accomplished was to give me time to simmer and stew.

The poker mindset book advises that I acknowledge the emotion. Okay, I'm a little tilted, and it's mistake tilt in this case. After that, I need to reinforce my mission there. I'm here only to play the next hand as well as I can and to keep doing that for a set number of hours, and emotions--happy or unhappy--are going to get in the way of both of these goals.

Finally, I need to appreciate that short term ups and downs are utterly meaningless. It's grinding the hours out that makes the magic happen. Shortening of hours played due to emotional instability has been a huge leak in my game and it's going to put me out of business soon if I don't plug it.

So I stuck around; not to get even, but to put in the full 6 hours that I wanted to play yesterday. Towards the end of the session I flopped a couple of sets, held, got paid, and got up to slightly above even.

So here's the other side of the short-term results fallacy: the session was close to ending and I was a little ahead, so the temptation was to play more conservatively. I recognized this as a form of tilt--fear of booking a daily loss, especially after getting out of a moderate-sized hole.

I resolved to play as +EV as possible, even if it meant putting my now-300bb+ stack in jeopardy. A bluffing opportunity came up and I took it to two barrels, but I didn't fire the third one, and that could have made all the difference.

So I still have a lot of work to do, but I feel like I'm making progress.

Flamingo: 6 hours:
(-$44)

The physical side of an emotion lasts 90 seconds in a human body. Any emotion that lasts longer than that is how we handle a situation.

edit added to show I'm not making **** up - This is best summarized in Jill Bolte Taylor’s book, A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey. She describes the 90-second rule as, “Once triggered, the chemical released by my brain surges through my body and I have a physiological experience. Within 90 seconds from the initial trigger, the chemical component of my anger has completely dissipated from my blood and my automatic response is over. If, however, I remain angry after those 90 seconds have passed, then it is because I have chosen to let that circuit continue to run.”

I actually read your BBV stories completely last night and this morning, one of the most entertaining reads on 2+2. I actually remembering reading the first part when you originally posted about card counting at the Western. Not sure why I never responded there all those years ago.

Thanks Da_Nit! I appreciate you.

I sat down for 6 hours yesterday and gave a fish around $500. Dude had my number, both yesterday and the day before, when he'd taken $150 from me. On both days he started with a $100 stack, ran it up--with my assistance--to $700 and $900 respectively, then donked it all away plus another $200 and $300 in extra buyins on the respective days.

My exact $400 loss for the day was a coincidence, and not the result of any stop-loss plan. I just happened to be exactly $400 down after exactly 6 hours of play. I'll take today and tomorrow off and be back on Tuesday.

Flamingo: 6 hours:
(-$400)