Quote:
Originally Posted by AlanBostick
Five years ago I had the opening-range charts from Peter Clarke's The Grinder's Manual on Post-Its on the wall above my monitor. Even longer ago than that, when I was grinding LHE, I had the opening-range chart from Stox & Zobags' Winning in Tough Holdem Games on a (software) sticky. It never occurred to me that this might be cheating, it being something that literally anyone could do with a pencil and paper. Eventually I got to where I never needed to consult the charts.
Yeah, I'm in the same boat. When I first started playing, I had a printed chart of "Group 1, Group 2, Group 3, etc" hands on the wall next to my desk. It wasn't even a chart so much as it was a color-coded list of starting hands. In fact, I think the groupings were defined by our own Sklansky and Malmuth, years before I ever joined this site. The funny part is that the chart was intended for limit HE, which means I was very likely overvaluing certain holdings and undervaluing others for NLHE.
To further illustrate how much I was trying to soak up the game, I even had that chart handy when watching televised poker. So yes, I was using an LHE starting hands chart to aid me as I watched people make decisions with 15x stacks at NLHE final tables. Shows you how soft poker must have been that even I still ended up being a winning rec. Yeeesh.
Was this cheating? By the OP's definition, yes. On the other hand, if any opponent knew that I consulted an Excel sheet to decide if I should play KJs or ATo, then they'd be salivating to join the table to relieve me of my whopping $25 buy-in.