I played some $15-$30 limit Hold'em yesterday. Very disappointing session, as I played a couple pots just plain horribly. While I'm very happy with much of my game, there's still a Fancy-Play Syndrome tendency I've noticed in myself recently. And these fancy plays have cost me a significant amount of money. And it's even more frustrating because it's a concept I'm very familiar with, and "know", ...
“Sick Call” Kenny vs. guy with good hand
I was browsing Twoplustwo.com the other day and saw this thread about Kenny Tran. They call him "Sick Call" Kenny because there've been several televised tournaments where he's made some unbelievable "sick calls" with weak hands. This hand from an old WSOP Main Event makes you wonder about Kenny's live-read skills, though (although he could be a fantastic player, I don't know anything about ...
Some tells in a $5-10 no-limit game
I went to Spirit Mountain Casino (in Grand Ronde, Oregon) this past weekend to study the difference between no-limit tells across a range of three different stakes: $1-3, $2-5, and $5-10. I wanted to do this because I'd been working on some chapters for the book related to how tells differ across stakes and between limit and no-limit. I'll tell you a few interesting observations I made on the ...
Phil Galfond and some great thoughts on poker
I had read the "Jman28 Well" thread on Twoplustwo.com about five years ago, then saw it was bumped just recently so I read the whole thing over again. If you don't know who Phil Galfond is, he's only one of the best players in the world. He's won millions beating up on high-stakes online cash game regulars under the screen name OMGClayAiken. His posts on Twoplustwo get highly-deserved accolades ...
Poker in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands
Sharky's Last week I was on the island of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. I couldn't find hardly anything online searching for 'St. Thomas poker'. A lot of people said that there was no place to play cards on St. Thomas; that you had to go to St. Croix to find a poker game at the casinos there. But I did find, on a nightlife-themed website, a small mention of one place advertising a ...
Online players, live players, and tell-reading ability
Live players get a bad rap from online players. You can find back-and-forth bickering from players on both sides of the aisle on a bunch of online forum threads. Online players insist live players are mostly horrible donkeys. Live players insist there’s a lot more to live poker than just pure poker skills (like live reads and social skills that increase action). Who’s right? They both are. ...
Baton Rouge poker – trip report
I was in Louisiana last week. I visited the Belle of Baton Rouge, a riverboat casino on the Mississippi River, right next to downtown Baton Rouge. This seems to be one of the only places to spread poker in the area. There's another nearby riverboat called Hollywood Casino but it doesn't have poker. There are also a few places across the river in Port Allen but none of them seemed to offer poker ...
Looking down when betting. Studying body posture.
Whenever I make a bad read on someone, which will happen occasionally, I get pissed off and start to really study the player and their behavior and try to figure out where I went wrong. It's my way of punishing myself for making mistakes. Basically, I want every stupid thing I do to have something good come out of it, so if I can just get a little bit of knowledge from every stupid thing I do I ...
Best strategy for playing a limit game with a kill
Continuing from my last post, I've got another big, basic strategy mistake I see even a lot of good players make in the $15-30 fixed limit game I play in. The mistake is this: they don't adjust their strategy to the fact that it's a kill game. For those of you unfamiliar with what a kill is, here's how it works; if a player wins two pots in a row, the next hand become double the stakes (in this ...
Raising too much pre-flop against loose players in limit
The game I play most often lately is a $15-30 fixed limit Hold'em with a full kill (which makes it $30-60). The game is a very loose, aggressive game by average standards, far juicier than you'd find in an average Vegas game. There are quite a few fairly decent card players there, but even the better ones make some pretty substantial, simple mistakes. I'm going to write in this post and the next ...