Right focus

Sometimes I think that I play too casually. Partly this is due to the amount of online poker that I have played in the last year. Partly this is due to watching my opponents and seeing their bad plays and knowing that they’ve made a bad play and assuming that I am a better player than they are. Partly this is due to trying to control my emotions and not get too involved in my game so that I make bad/impatient plays.

I notice this sometimes in STTs, when we’re sitting 5 or 6 handed. At that moment a light goes on. If I really want to, if I am patient but appropriately aggressive, if I pay attention and watch how my opponents play beyond just their HUD stats, if I really want to win or at least ITM, I can do it. Often this works out for me, but it’s like I have to shift into another gear of focus, of desire to win. I have to try harder, but without getting inappropriately anxious or tense.

In a lot of physical activities you have to train your body. Some muscles need to be always tense, others, tense to a certain extent, but others need to be loose and relaxed all the time. And some key other other ones need to be relaxed but ready. If these ones are tense it slows their reaction time. These ones may be used often but need to be relaxed when not in use so that they can respond very quickly.

This combination of tense, tense but controlled, relaxed, and relaxed but ready can take years to develop and control. There is an activity of mine that I have been involved with for a very long time. For around 9 years it was my passion and my single most important focus. Nowadays I’m still involved with it but it’s only a hobby but even still I go back and check this combination of muscle situations regularly to make sure I’m not getting into bad habits.

I’ve only been playing poker a year and a half and am still working on developing the equivalent combination of tense/relaxed/ready mental muscles. Finding this balance between relaxed and focused is something that I still need to work on.

Poker porn

Most poker sites have .net versions of their site as well as a .com version. My understanding of this is that the .net version is play money only. I’m guessing that they do this for marketing purposes so that they can advertise these play money sites whereas they cannot advertise the real money versions. This way they can say, “play like the pros at blahblahblah.net”, and then get the name out there for the real money version.

But there seems to be no or little difference in the software or servers. People registered as .net players are able to play real money freerolls, or at least this seems to be the case. I wonder what someone who is basically self-taught would think if they learned to play at play money tables, then started playing freerolls, won some money, and then tried to play at the real money tables? Play money tables play much differently because most of the people are self-taught (I recall watching hands play out and ruing the fact that I folded my Ace-2 offsuit because an ace came on the flop and I would have won that hand. Sound familiar?). Freerolls are another matter again. You get some players who know something about playing but not always playing optimally, against self-taught players, against players whose instruction comes from watching the big bluffs that are excerpted for TV.

The craziest are the freerolls that run all the time so there is no cost to busting out since another starts up in a minute or two. People get excited as if it’s poker porn or something. Registration fills up in seconds and then people seem hell bent on busting out just as fast. My advice for playing these; shove AK/AQ and the big pairs AA down to TT preflop. Limp any suited connectors even with gaps and big connectors that aren’t suited, as well as any suited Aces, medium pairs and even small pairs. These are all hands that can hit monsters which is what you are seeking. Don’t worry about trying to raise preflop with anything else; preflop raises do almost nothing to chase these wild players from playing, especially a donk who has a huge rack because he shoved any 2 hole cards in the first hand and took out 4 other people. Just encourage him to spew chips when your hand hits hard. If you have a big stack relative to the blind size (30 or more BBs), then you can afford to call small raises too with the above hands and still try to hit flops. If you get 2 pair or better, look at the stack sizes that are still in the hand with you. If they’re big stacks, you’ve got to really overbet to protect your hand/get value from the bad players. Don’t think in terms of pot odds, think in terms of stack sizes because that’s what they will be thinking. If he’s got 10,000 chips and a flush draw he won’t have a problem paying 300 into a 600 pot after you pot it, but he’ll also pay 1,500 to chase a 1,800 pot even if there are no implied odds because you’ve pushed. They are willing to pay to chase, even if they’re drawing anorexic-ally slim. Don’t try to play reasonable poker until it’s down to 2 tables or thereabouts.

It can be fun though since it’s all about drawing/chasing and taking down huge pots when you flop the nuts and someone thinks their 8s in the hole are good or that they can scare you off by shoving in their stack. These Ivey-wannabe-kiddies think they’re making the moves but in reality are just playing like drunken maniacs. Of course they will have their fair share of suck outs too, so that’s when it’s good that there’s another event coming up in a moment.

Anyway, someone going through this kind of learning process is going to have a heck of a time trying to play real poker.

On the other hand, I wonder though if there is any value to playing these to develop a style for playing the rebuy period of rebuy tournies. There are definite similarities as you can try to play anything that might hit a big hand.