Posted By: hdouble
"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man."
--Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

I've been holed up in my humble Hollywood cabin for the last few days, hard at work on an article about Poker Blogs. The finished product has gotten positive reviews so far, including one from yours truly, who reads with an extremely critical eye. The article is for a new poker mag, and should be out by the end of the month. I couldn't have done it without the great Ignatius T., who assisted with some of the writing between draughts, and offered healthy doses of moral support during the brutal editing process. I'll let you know more about the magazine as the release date approaches.

I love to write, so the article was a good experience, but the hard work involved made me long for the familiar unscripted blog format. I spent around 10 hours polishing up the article, and had to think about such things as "target audience" and do my best to satisfy a demanding editor. I felt pretty good about the piece until I read Jesse May's WSOP writeup on Ted Forrest, which was so well-written that I felt like throwing my final draft out the window. Damn that boy can write! His recent trip reports have blown away all other poker journalism on the planet, and his writing style is hands down better than any of the authors who wrote the poker canon. I just ordered my copy of "Shut up and Deal", and anxiously await its arrival.

May's Dylanesque take on Ted Forrest's game made me think about the evolution of my game, and where it goes from here. I feel like my game has reached somewhat of a plateau-- I play pretty solidly these days, and I'm making fewer mistakes at the table. I do my best to incorporate some creativity to my game, but 90% of my game is straightforward tight-aggressive play. The main reason for this is that most of my hands come from playing 3 tables simultaneously online, and there isn't that much room for creativity on the loose-passive $3-6 tables of Empire-- this type of game is all about implied odds, and if you get too fancy you'll find yourself bleeding chips. So how can I take my game to that next level, making plays that nobody at the table thought possible, winning a monster pot with a junk hand because your reads are incredibly sharp? Jesse gives us a clue:

"But as far as I can tell, about eight to ten years ago Ted Forrest got into running poker simulations through a computer. He got together with the Eight or Better Kid, that maniacal pudge faced infuriatingly always right paranoid control freak from the Midwest USA, and they started running simulations that nobody had thought of. Weird simulations, flexible maybes, particular situations with certain kinds of players involving percentages of things that might possibly be happening. I don't know what I'm talking about. But I seen what it did to them. I seen strange looks on their faces and strange glints in their eyes. They don't play like everybody else, and I seen them spin people round and round and round."

Simulations. It's a well known fact that any hold 'em starting hand is not that big of an underdog (if you haven't figured this out after an endless streak of bad beats, take up stud). The key is matching up which hands can be played with the appropriate table conditions. KTo from early position in a loose-aggressive game? Probably not a good idea, but in a loose-passive game, it's a winner if you play it right. The key point here is that poker is so situational, the rules of thumb we use to guide our play are often far too rigid. If you can figure out how to refine those rules, to bend them to fit the game just right, you can extract the big bets from the unsuspecting, uncreative players surrounding you. That means it's time to go back to the lab. To break free from the solid, tight-aggressive shell and climb into poker greatness, you've got to do the research. You've got to spend the time tweaking the rules, running sim after sim until you know exactly when to play that KTo, and when you play it, you ram it down their weak tight throats.

I'm not quite there yet, but before I get off this plateau and reach the next level of limit poker, I'll be spending a lot of time in sim city.

Oh I almost forgot, I made it to Hollywood Park on Sunday and pocketed $350 in 4 hours on the table of dreams. A loose-passive $6-12 table where a young girl had 400 $2 chips stacked in front of her. It turns out that her and her buddy had been playing for 20 hours straight, and they were making plenty of mistakes. She actually played pretty well, and showed me her pocket rockets before laying them down after being check-raised on the flop with K 7 7 on board. There must have been $4000 on the table, and there were plenty of $200 pots. Most of my money came from a monster pot I raked when my set turned into a boat on the river, punishing a guy to my right who caught his nut flush on the turn. It was even nicer that the player to my left caught runner-runner to make a smaller boat, and called my river raise. But $60 of that win went to a long and boring morning limit tourney, where I placed 70th out of 170. And subtract another Franklin that I lost playing $5-10 short on Empire as a B&M warmup. Still, that's a $190 day, I'll take it. I need to make it down there more often.

Poker Blog Report
I finally linked up to the most famous blogger to write about poker, Wil Wheaton. I really enjoyed Wil's writeup of the Hollywood speakeasy game in his "Lying in Odessa" posts, and found myself wondering what I could do to get in this game (it's right down the street from me). Most of us bloggers are writing about online play, where your opponent is a collection of pixels sitting in a room somewhere far away. This "new school" of poker lacks the colorful characters of the "old school," where there was no such thing as a legal game, and the old guards like T.J. Cloutier and Texas Dolly drove hours to find a game in some dingy room filled with suspicious characters. Think getting your Aces cracked is a bad beat? Try losing all your winnings when some thug with a shotgun walks away with all the chips in the room. Wil's writeup was a nice combination of the old and the new school: Hollywood heavy-hitters facing off in an illegal game in a back-alley speakeasy. Expect more great poker posts from Wil, as the poker bug has bitten him hard.

Speaking of bug bites, get well wishes go out to Mean Gene, who paid for the sin of doing yard work with a vicious spider bite. Sadly, I was slightly jealous of Geno's peaceful hospital stay, and wistfully pictured myself sleeping 12 hours a day and playing on Empire for the other 12. I guess that means I should start sprinting around and appreciate the remaining strength in my legs before I become catatonic...

There are too many Vegas trip reports to mention, and I'll be adding my own. I'll be on the rail for the first weekend of the main event, unless by some miracle I manage to win my way in if I get there early enough to play a last-chance satellite. But with the number of entrants likely to be in the 2000 ballpark, I can't understand how anyone could think they have any chance of winning this thing. But I'll be at the Horseshoe for the opening weekend of the big one, so if anybody wants to hook up, shoot me an email.

No mas! Thanks for reading... as one of my coaches always said, "You never stay the same. You get better or worse every day." Get better.

Posted by hdouble at May 5, 2004 09:05 PM | TrackBack

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