"Bad Beat Therapy, Part Seven: Exercises for Better Poker" is now available:

https://www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/...eat-part-7.php

Best wishes,
Mason

Bad Beat Therapy: Better Poker and Life through Psychoanalysis, the link I found on two plus two won't work.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G891A using Tapatalk

To protect our authors, and unlike many other sites, we only leave our magazine articles up for six months and then return all rights for the articles back to our authors. So Part One is probably now gone and it's not a broken link.

Best wishes,
Mason

Thanks Mason,

I really enjoyed that article. The bit about playing a few hands without looking at your cards sounds fun.

It's strange to see poker authors talk about 'varying your playing style' in 2018. In (almost?) every poker situation, given the info that one has about the opponents, there's only one (possibly mixed) strategy that maximizes the longterm (current + future) $EV. 'Styles' arise from the lack of knowledge of the optimal strategy. A perfect player would have no distinct 'style' but would adapt properly to any table lineup. Thus the 'switch of gears' should be based on the lineup and the phase of the tournament, not on the player's mood.

A great read, and some insightful ways to play. You had me chuckle with this;

"Another experiment was to open a wide range of hands out of position and only premium hands in position. Once again, the idea here was to break old habits and experiment with something new. After I lucked out and won several hands with horrible cards, a player lost it, and yelled, “Do you have any idea what you are doing?!” I responded calmly, “Winning?” LOL

Sometimes at my local casino just before the break and the last time to enter the tournament some players with average or lower stacks will go all in blind and I remember the last 3 hands were announced before a break was to be took. A player went all in blind twice and won.. and on the last hand shoved again to win 3 flips on the bounce.. it was fun to witness