Borderline donkeyism
Tuesday March 27th 2007, 2:10 am
Filed under: EPT,Full Tilt Poker,Heads Up,No-Limit Hold'em,Poker Stuff,PokerStars,S&G,Shorthanded

Haha! Sometimes to beat a donkey you gotta play the borderline hands, hard. Sometimes? Maybe more like “almost always”. Anyway, I had to do just that against two out of three opponents today. Good news, I was right, they were borderline donkeys. Now they weren’t pure fish, but pure losing poker players. The bad news, they caught like crazy on me in the right spots. Oh well…can’t do anything about that…so…moving on…

I’m really looking forward to the EPT grand final in Monte Carlo. I’m pretty excited to see that the webcast of the german EPT from Dortmund was such a huge success that they’ll continue to do it…finishing off the season in Monte Carlo. For those of you who missed it: they do a live webcast of the feature table and the final table. Now, it’s not as exciting as the WPT or similar edited formats as you don’t see the whole cards – then again, it’s exciting nontheless as you can try to put people on hands yourself and the commentary is usually really good (I really enjoyed John “The father of the EPT” Duthie on the Dortmund webcast)…check EPTLive.com for more info about this thing…

Poker, oh poker, it’s all skill, start with the worst hand and go all-in…lol…that should be the new Matusow donkey/poker song…apropos Matusow…out of the new FullTilt commercials, I like the Matusow/Cunningham one the best…although some of the others (especially the Phil Ivey and Chris Ferguson ones) are pretty good, too…check them out…here

As for offline poker stuff…I finished both Joe Navarro’s book and the Suicide King and liked them both for different reasons. The Navarro book is a real eye-opener and I’ll be happy to at least try to apply some of the stuff he’s talking about. One thing will be hard though and that is deciphering  the “tell to reason for the tell”-relationship. Why? I discussed this with a fellow poker player of “my home game” and my point was this: It’s one thing to spot something in a player. If you spot this or that behaviour, cool, you should normally be able to put him on a narrower range of hands with this info. True and not true. The (big) problem? I’ll call it “hand perception”: Headsup pot, no raise preflop, Player A in EP holds nothing on the flop containing two hearts, it goes check, check, turn brings a low card, Player A exhibits a high confidence tell….what does he hold?

Now, if that Player A was me…I would have probably hit a set there…but the Player A, I’m talking about, just hit his pair (let’s say a pair of sixes) and he still got a flush draw (somewhere along the lines of the fifth nutflush draw)…see the problem here? He thinks he holds a monster, hence the high confidence tell…I don’t think so…but he does…so spotting the tell is worthless without the context and this is that much harder with people who don’t operate on the same “hand strength”-scale as you do…that said, if I spotted the same tell vs Player B on the same board, I would know almost exactly where I’m at…the beauty of poker…that said, about time that I get into a live game again…I’m itching to sling some cards…hopefully it’ll happen within the next two weeks…

As for the “Suicide King” book, it was really entertaining…now I gotta wait until Amazon get’s into gear and finally delivers me “Hunting Fish….” 🙁


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