The month ahead...

Well, first up lets talk about what's behind. HU spew offs. Drunken play. Tilty sessions (not really behind, but hopefully less :)). More importantly as those sessions start to make their way into distant memory, I pickup momentum in new world poker learning. This is where I actually try to improve my game rather than do the bare minimum to trick my mind into thinking I deserve to win. Well as a consequence, one thing falling into the category of behind is my ABC poker brain. Not that I've perfected ABC poker by any means, but the more and more I read, the more and more I realise, I don't need ABC as much as I need other things. One unremarkable feature of ABC is the ability to play your hand in the optimum way, and I'll come back to this.

To totally move away from my point, I'll point out poker learning is cyclical. I first heard "Position, Position, Position!!!" about 2 months into playing, but just recently, I've started to analyse it a bit more, and I'm just now realising what a strong poker tool position is. Look at any hand you've posted to a forum and if it's OOP, imagine how much easier it would have been to play in position. There are just so many advantages to playing a HU flop in position, as you can realistically plan out your hand right now. OOP you can start a plan, but so much depends on his reaction. Position gives you easy cbets, pot control, double barrel opportunities, river betting opportunities, floating, drawing, value betting, etc etc etc.

You underestimate the importance of almost anything when you first hear about it in poker.

So my latest thing is playing the players. I've blogged about it, but still I've been close to the worst implementer. I'd suggest playing the player, when I wasn't even effectively player reading myself. Now I'm starting to get those reads based on last weeks excersizes, but I have to do something with those. I'll keep working at all of the player reading, as I'm still a beginner there really, but I'll possibly add some ideas of what to do with those reads soon. Suffice to say, like the position question before about seeing the same flop in position or out, player reading completely turns a hand on it's head. Like the simplest is you flop mid set, ace high against a maniac or a calling station. You obviously want the maniac to think you are weak, and you understand the calling station never folds top pair. But if you don't treat those situations differently, you may as well give up at poker, because you are set to be a loser. If the reason you play those two hands the same is due to not really reading players post flop play, then you have a major leak. It takes a lot to beat this game, and playing players is ultimately one of the key things to it all, if not the biggest thing about poker!!!

So to come back to playing your hand optimally, even ABC poker requires reads and using those reads to maximise value, minimise losses. So technically while I'm over trying ABC poker, I'm still not getting anywhere near doing it properly yet. Thus, I have a very long way to go in poker.

In any case, I'm going to be grinding this next month. After that I'm likely to get a coach. I've been fumbling with the keys long enough now, it's time to find the lock and open it. I seriously think the guidance and hard work combined will result in me being a winning NL100 player in no time, and at very least getting me competetive at NL50 again. But I'm hoping if I find the right sort of coach, that I'll be able to start piecing together a lot of what's still wrong with my game, which after a month of grinding, hopefully I'll know a bit about myself.

So the months goal is to play NL25, table select, read players, grind. No more, no less.