Good post. I too like the front door/back door aggression. All we hear about is a player is 15/12 or 28/24 yet sometimes both of these players can be pretty wild post flop, or passive.

I think what's different about my experience is that I started out playing really tight and then gradually adjusting to where I am. I've played laggy before but never as crazy as some. I don't think I've ever tried to be loose or bluffy just to do it though.

Good use of vocab too. There are a few gem sentences in there; a few places I disagree though.

I think it's for sure a compliment. Getting people to play badly against you is a great quality.

Good post Ae. Like the others I like the whole upfront / backdoor jargon and I hope it catches on in the forums.

Thanks man, great post!

Funny thing is that your evolution steps really is on point for me. Passed milestone #1 at the end of summertimes and have been playing recklessly aggro for quite some time. I've just begun to work on and think about milestone #2. #4 I'll need to begin trying harder I guess, right now it's a mess. I guess it's quite some time before number 3, but I'll get there eventually.

Enjoyable and bookmarked, ty.

Thanks for writing this post, I enjoyed it. Some lines even made me LOL.

am i the only one who is waiting for twp to post in this?

no

I think the TWP comment was tacky and in bad taste personally, especially seeing as how he is in fact better than the vast majority of msnl. Other than that good read ae

oh, and can a mod please give him the title 'backdoor aggressor' !

didn't know that was the highlight of the article, but you're all welcome to use it in a totally heterosexual way.

anxiously, in fact.

to those who say it was in bad taste: it is HONEST to goodness the first thing i thought of when i thought of passing that level or whatever. once you realize he's nothing more than a glorified troll that we all in some way have learned to accept and sometimes even love you will be astounded at the other things you mentioned.

i just feel like he was the first person who i was always liek "this guy is awesome" and then "he's just human"

i won 75k at 5-10 and 3-6 hu in september, and then i lost 30k in october, but ran ~60k below all in equity. that humbled me.

i haven't played a 10k hand session in like 4 months. despite the fact that they are 'bad' for you, they are part of the learning curve. i personally think you SHOULD do this at least a dozen times. it works out kinks, puts you in the zone, etc. in fact, during some of these half tilt induced sessions you will be playing the best poker of your life for hours at a time becuase you are so focused and in tune with poker and always going with your reads. conversely, this will be very high variance poker and sometimes lead to bigger losses.

being down 10 buy ins can do something amazing to a man's soul- that amazing thing is only sometimes positive.

obviously when you learn who is really good you can improve your game more. when i read a thread in hsnl, especially if it gets long, i will only read a select dozen or two posters that i recognize the name of, simply because too much stupid trolly advice gets there.

my friends were VERY important, unbelievably important. i've got a good poker friend named jimmie that i met two years ago. he's played cash, then tournaments, hu sngs, just about everything. he's a sick, sick player, getting much much better as of late with a lot of my advice, and had about a quarter of a mill december, which makes me very happy for him. he and i have a pact that we won't get jealous of each other, so we co-exsist easily. also, we're opposite personalities because he hates attention and i'm an attention whore.

talkingot other people like g-p (gabe, not tc), ansky, luckychewy on aim make me much better. it's not so much that we gab for hours about a certain strat (although that is the topic much more rarely nowadays, it was more prevelent at one time), it's that we send each other a hand once every three or four days or something, make a few comments about it, reassure each other of the standardness, etc. i like talking to players better than me, and i consider everyone i talk to to be better than me in at least some and almost always most facets of the game.

all, i've found the next chapter to this book.

Milestone #5: Buy a house in Florida for the winter.

Happy hanuka.

I think ActionJackson is going to tear this post up!

Thanks for writing this and speeding up my evolution process

i enjoyed reading this post. don't think all of it is dead on, but it was fun to read, you're a good writer.

haha, seriously

yea, not so much

I know I was a huge nit at first (although this was in 2004 when at 1/2 nl that was prbably the best strategy) and have loosened up tightened up etc many times
Part of is also how the game evolves around you. What wins the most today wont win the most in 10 years.

nice post ae, i find i've been more and more inclined to make it a point to read ur posts in threads recently.

nice post. not sure how much i agree with this being the whole picture or necessarily the correct order, but I can def relate to most of these things.

-claps for ae and aj not biting each other's heads off-

great thread aaron, this really made me laugh

how about "aggressive in the backdoor" ?

v v good ae i agree with a ton of these

Nice post.

I think a really important milestone to while keeping the entire "not everyone who is on a forum is good" in mind, is to seek out players who want to talk about the game. I think one of my biggest leaps in my game came from my discussions on hands with Brian (aba). We were both regulars in the 25/50 game, and after playing a lot of heads up and me being new to 2+2, he decided to IM me and we'd talk about almost every hand that gave us trouble. This is esp important during rough swings because so often when you are a winning player who is losing at the moment, you are too quick to say "**** I'm running bad, **** variance" but in reality you are making a ton of mistakes that could help your run of "bad luck". Maybe you had a second best hand, but you could have played it well enough to lose only half a buy in instead of your whole stack. Maybe you aren't value betting thin enough. Def seek out people who you think are good or may have a different style and just start going over hands.

Also I think the biggest difference between going from MSNL to HSNL is to make reads almost without stats. I mean stats are all fine and whatever, but in reality the people you have a ton of stats on, you should probably have a better feel for their game than 2 or 3 numbers can tell. And if you don't have enough hands to make an accurate read, then the stats that are based on these hands probably aren't really enough of a sample to decide anything. If you look at a decent MSNL hand, they will tell one or two things about the table, then list the stats of the villain(s), then show the hand. Whenever a really good HSNL post comes up, there is usually a paragraph or two either in the opening post or a follow up that really paints a picture of the table in your mind. I think relying on stats too much can be an anchor around the neck of good MSNL players who are unable to get up to HSNL.

As a final thought, you have to be pretty sweet to shove over someone who has put in 3 bets on a J 7 6 no flush draw board with KQhigh, but you have to be real ****ing sweet to call off the rest of your stack with it