Some significant developments in the last week, during which I’ve averaged over 12 hours of poker per day:

-I’m getting much better at multitabling online poker.  Actually paying attention, i.e., not surfing the net or IMing with five different people, helps.  Who knew?

-I’ve been profitable.  I’ve made several final tables in the past week, but the big score has eluded me.  I do feel my tournament game is as sharp as it’s ever been, as my stats attest, and that something very large is inevitable.  Also, I’ve been kicking ass in sit n’ gos:  for some reason, I currently can do no wrong in one table tourneys.  Not sure if that’s due to positive variance or if something has clicked.  Probably just running good. 

-I am consistently getting my ass kicked in cash games.  I decided to mix in some 6-max NL cash games, and I’ve had maybe one or two winning sessions out of perhaps 15.  The freakin’ cash games are the only thing that has kept this week from being a huge step forward.  There is definitely something wrong with the way I play 6-max NLHE.  My current theory is that I’m too aggressive, both preflop and postflop.  I’m going to try a more conservative approach.  If that doesn’t work, I’ll either have to take it all the way back to the drawing board or say goodbye to online cash games.

-Poker Ace HUD rules.  I have no idea why it took me so long to add it to my repertoire, but I finally have, and it’s great.  For those who have no idea what i’m talking about, Poker Ace HUD is a PokerTracker companion program that puts your opponents’ statistics on the screen while you play.  While PokerTracker (a very standard poker databasing program that I’ve used for a long time) continually compiles statistics, Poker Ace HUD goes a step farther and prints your opponent’s tendencies (for instance, how often he/she raises preflop and how often he/she fires a continuation bet) right there on the screen next to their name.  Is it unfair to have this information?  I’m not sure, and I don’t care.  It’s available and I’m using it.  I’ve found that Poker Ace HUD is a non-factor for about 98% of the hands dealt, but that around 2% of the time, it has helped me make some very close decisions easier.  And that very slim edge makes it totally worth having.

-I’m tired.  Working hard is working hard, whether you’re digging ditches, drafting a brief or playing poker.  Anything for 12 hours per day is tough.  So I’m beat.  But for the most part, it’s a good feeling.  Nobody is asking me to work so hard, I’m self-motivated.  I think they call it being driven.  The bottom line is that I’m dedicated to being the best poker player I can be and that this is another stage in my development.  I’ve rarely been fully committed to much of anything, so it’s actually refreshing to be working so hard (although I still get pretty upset when some schmuckhole sucks out on me in the sixth hour of a hard-fought tournament).  Despite playing 12+ hours per day, I find myself thinking about the game during my non-playing waking hours (poor Janeen, hehe), which is proof of my passion. 

-I’m aware of how physically out of shape I am.  Despite doing a decent job of not eating junk, I am still a schlub.  I’ve never been an exerciser, but at my old desk jobs, I’d at least walk to court, walk to lunch, walk to the subway, etc.  Now I don’t even do that.  When I’m putting in long days playing online poker, my daily exercise is a one-block walk to get coffee in the morning (note:  “morning” here is defined very loosely), and occasional walks to the bathroom (I haven’t resorted to the deskside bedpan just yet!).  My body does absolutely nothing all day.  I’m a sloth.  It’s a little bit depressing.  I hereby vow to start off half my days by going for a jog in the park once the weather permits. 

Okay, that’s all for now.  I think I’ll play some online poker. 

While I have no interest in renewing the “big law firm” debate from a couple of weeks ago, I do want to take the liberty of making an analogy using the same model.

I’ve made a decision to enter a period of hyperactivity.  I’m going to be multitabling online or playing live poker for at least 12 hours per day for the next couple of weeks.  I am very determined to re-establish my profitability as a player right now, and bombarding my statistics with man-hours seems to be the best way to do that.

It’s gonna be just like there’s a big motion due when I was working at the firm!  OMG OMG OMG OMG!  Footnote #2 is spaced wrong.  No wait, it’s okay.  Wait wait wait… the appendices are all off.  Somebody needs to bluebook Section four!!!  And so forth. 

Sigh… at least my billables for February and March will look good!

I am back from Puerto Rico, which was a good vacation.  Great weather, lots of fun places to party and practice my gringo-level espanol.  And my crew unwittingly booked ourselves at the hotel with Puerto Rico’s best poker room, the Intercontinental. 

The Intercontinental runs decent no-limit tournaments throughout the weekend, and all of Puerto Rico’s finest poker players show up for them.  On Sunday afternoon, in particular, I was surprised at the number of serious poker players who attended.  I was not the most accomplished tournament pro in the room–a gentleman whom I vagulely reognized was there.  It turns out he was Karlo Lopez, who has had quite a bit of success in the WSOP and other major events.  Anyway, the Intercontinental is a very nice place and offers a bonus to those who enjoy poker.  Highly recommended.

Today, since baseball’s spring training is now well underway (sports fans are in the midst of that awful dead spot between the Super Bowl and March Madness), I thought I’d write a piece comparing baseball to tournament poker.  It’s especially apropos for me since I have just gone through dry spell, which is common to both sports (yes, I’m employing the word “sports” very loosely with respect to poker).  It’s also especially apropos for me because my grandfather taught me everything he knew about both poker and baseball when I was just a lad.  I was basically reared on both games.

Oh, and yeah, I know.   Baseball as a metaphor for pretty much everything else in the world has already been done.  Whatever.  My blog. 

In both baseball and poker tournaments, failure is the norm.  The very best batters only reach base safely roughly 40% of the time, and the very best tournament poker players only cash roughly 20% of the time.  An at bat or tournament finish results in nothing spectacular on all but a few occasions.  Thus, neither hitting nor tourney poker are healthy for people who can’t cope with frustration.  See O’Neill, Paul and Hellmuth, Phil, both of whom probably have shorter life expectancies than you or I.

Both pursuits reward patience and discipline.  Most successful batters succeed by forcing the pitcher into a spot where the pitcher must throw a hittable pitch, then seizing that opportunity when it finally arrives.  Skilled hitting is both a science and an art form:  the very best hitters systematically destroy a pitcher during each at bat by fouling off or taking the difficult pitches, then finally, once the pitcher exhibits some vulnerability, smashing the ball.  Likewise, a good tournament poker player often lays in wait, sometimes for very long periods of time, observing his opponents.  Then when an opponent eventually makes a mistake, the good poker player is there to exploit it.  A good example of this is a big preflop bluff executed by a tight player against a very loose, wild opponent.  The loose opponent may steal the observant player’s blinds many times over the course of a couple of hours, but when there is a lot of loose money trapped in the middle, the skilled player finally pounces.

There is yet another way that batting and tournament poker are very analogous:  in both fields it is very important not to be results-oriented in the short term.  In the short term, there is a tremendous amout of luck involved in both pursuits.  All baseball fans know all about “hittin’ ’em where they ain’t” (shoutout to Wee Willie Keeler)–wicked line drives frequently become outs, and broken bat dribblers frequently become base hits.  And all poker players know that pocket aces sometimes get cracked, and that sometimes seven-four offsuit rivers a straight.  Some of the greatest plays in baseball history have involved unlikely sequences (like say, a series of soft base hits culminating with a slow dribbler going through an opponent’s legs on a certain October night in 1986), and some of the greatest moments in poker history have likewise involved some very strange doings.  In baseball and poker, for brief glimpses, it can sometimes be better to be lucky than good. 

However, in the long run, in both baseball and poker, it is always better to be good.  That’s because everyone is equally lucky in the aggregate.  Taking this long view is difficult, since we all live our daily lives from moment to moment, a.k.a. the short term.  Even a lifetime .320 hitter gets really pissed off when he lines into a double play with the bases loaded in the ninth inning.  And even hardened poker pros ask God “why!?” when they lose with pocket kings against pocket sixes all-in preflop on the final table bubble.

In order to stay sane and continue to improve, I try to distinguish between my “bad slumps” and “variance slumps.”  I presume baseball players do the same thing.  We’ve all seen hitters in the throws of a bad slump.  They are off balance at the plate, taking pitches down the middle, and flailing at pitches in the dirt.  Hitters in bad slumps go 1 for 28 without hitting the ball out of the infield.  A poker player in a bad slump is consistently getting his money in the pot when he’s behind and/or failing to put money in the pot when he’s ahead.

Bad slumps require self-analysis and correction.  A hitter in a bad slump will take extra batting practice or perhaps revamp his stance or approach.  A poker player in a bad slump likewise must take the time to examine his game and figure out what he’s doing wrong.  In a way, the badly slumping baseball player probably is better off than the poker player.  Being sent to the minors can’t suck as badly as losing your bankroll.

Then we have the variance slump, probably the more frequent type of slump in both baseball and poker.  In baseball, the victim of a variance slump is doing nothing wrong mentally or mechanically.  The balls he hits are simply landing in the wrong places, usually his opponents’ gloves.  Everyone familiar with baseball knows that it is very common to hit line drives all over the yard yet finish the night 0-5.  I’ve seen players go through week-long slumps without ever having a bad at bat.  As a matter of fact, it is Joe DiMaggio’s miraculous defiance of baseball’s natural variance, not merely his supreme skill, that makes baseball’s record 56-game hitting streak such an astounding achievement.  It’s the baseball equivalent of winning an all-in with AK over a pocket pair 20 straight times.

In poker, the variance slump is such a common phenomenon that it’s barely worth citing examples of it.  On a personal level, I can tell you that I’ve been through multiple week-plus periods this year without earning any money.  And after careful, painstaking, Tony Gwynn-like examination of all the videotape, I have determined that I’ve only had a couple of bad at bats.  Tough?  Yes.  Typical?  Also yes. 

Lemme tells ya kid, it ain’t easy up here in the bigs. 

::Spits, adjusts cup::

Writing that made me hungry for some baseball. 

Let’s Go Mets!  

So today I’m headed to Puerto Rico for my friend Dave’s bachelor party.  I did a little homework and it seems that they do have poker at Puerto Rican casinos.  The reports state that all they spread is limit hold ’em with an outrageous (10%) rake.  But the reports also state that it’s no fold ’em hold ’em in the truest sense:  pretty much every player sees every flop.  We’ll see what this mainland rock can do in these games.

Unfortunately, this is the most exciting poker-related thing I can say about this trip to Vegas. 

I played two tournaments, bubbling the $300 at the Wynn on Thursday, then finishing 17th out of around 80 players at the $1000 at Bellagio on Friday.  In both tournaments I made a nice comeback and had plenty of chips just before my demise.  I then got into a big confrontations with bigger stacks, got my money in when I was ahead, and got drawn out on.  If I win either hand, I’m making big money.  Blah.

The cash games haven’t been much better.  I got into a juicy NL game at the Wynn, but had a few unlucky breaks there and couldn’t make much money.  Then I played in a 2-4 NL game at Mandalay Bay, which historically has always been among the fishiest of scenes.  But when I went (Thursday Night), I was disappointed to find that it was a table full of poker dealers from other properties, all of whom were good players, and some of whom were softplaying one another.  Far from ideal conditions.  Oh well.

As the title of this post implies, I had the opportunity to play with Sam Grizzle on this trip.  When the Bellagio tournament got down to two tables, I drew the seat to Sam’s immediate right.  Some of you might remember Mr. Grizzle from ESPN’s 2003 World Series of Poker coverage, when he and Phil Hellmuth were hurling insults at one another. 

Sam is a very interesting character.  He’s an older, weather-beaten looking man from South Carolina, a true veteran of the poker scene that plays mostly cash games.  He talks continuously while he plays.  His chatter, which is delivered rapidfire in a thick accent (he sounds kinda like Hank Hill’s jibberish-talking friend on “King of the Hill”) has a disorienting, dizzying effect on his opponents.  He simply does not shut up, even when hands are being contested.  He seems to have a talent for separating his brain from his mouth–he can make accurate reads and good decisions at the table while simultanesouly talking utter nonsense about scinitllating topics like the best catfish he ever tasted. 

Sam also has a reputation for being very surly and discourteous, to put it nicely.  Others might just say that he’s a jackass.  I do know that at one time he was banned from both the Mirage and Bellagio.  He has allegedly gotten into physical altercations with both Phil Helmuth and David Grey.  On Friday, though, Sam was running good and was in a capital mood.

Sam had just busted another player.  The other guy limped in early position and Sam checked his big blind.  The flop came A-2-5 rainbow and Sam led out with a 1/2 pot sized bet.  The other guy smooth called.  The turn was a 9, and again Sam bet half the pot, and got called again.  The river was a jack, and this time Sam made a big bet.  The other guy immediately went all in and Sam said “ah cawl” before the other guy could even push his chips into the pot.  The other guy showed a set of fives, but Grizzle turned over the 4-3 of spades.  He had flopped a wheel.  And boy was he delighted with himself.  He cackled for three solid minutes after the conclusion of the hand.

Playing next to Sam Grizzle went something like this:

So, ahm head-up in this Omahaw-eight tourn’ment.  This hadda be ’round ’92 or ’93.  And this guy cain’t play a lick.  I mean, yer sister can play better Omahaw-eight than this fella.  But he’s talkin’ all sorta mess.  Sez ah got no chaince ‘gainst ‘im.  Tells it to mah faice.  (Sam open-folds).  Well you know ahh ain’t takin’ that shit from this nobody, so ah sez to him, ‘aww right fella, how’s ’bout this here:  let’s the two of us play for awl the caish, second place gets nothin’.’  Well that shut ‘im up right good.  So then ah started beatin’ on him, pot after pot…  Hol’ on justa second while ah try to steal these here blinds…. (Sam raises three times the big blind).  So finally ah git this dummy down to ’round a third of the chips in play, and the blinds are a-way up there now… (the small blind puts in a reraise).  Reraise to how much?  Sementy-two hunnerd?  What in the hell could you have there, bud, bettin’ me sementy-two hunnerd?  Ah raise it up in second position and you pull that shit?…  Aww right, i’m gonna lay one down for you, fella, jus’ this one time… (Sam folds, dealer ships opponent the pot).  So where was I?  Right, so this guy comes in fer a raise and ah look down n’ see two aces and a duece.  So ah reraise this fella all in, and he cawls me with… get this… some boolshit haind like jack-nahn-semen-three.  (Sam open-folds the next hand)… An’ a-course what flops?  jack, nahn, semen.  This fool makes two payer on me.  But the turn ‘an river came a-runnin’ tens or some shit and ah win the damn tourn’ment.  Ain’t that some shit?  (Sam open folds again and notices my little box of toothpicks).  Care to share, pardner?  (I give Sam a toothpick and he pops it in his mouth, then makes an exaggerated funny face).  Goddamn, what in the fuck is een these things?  Awstrailyen tee-trea toothpics?!  My mouth is burnin’!  What kinda of bool-shit toothpick did you give me, fella?  Yer tryin’ to take me offa mah game, ain’t ya?  Well that ain’t gon’ work on me, ah can tell you that…

I have arrived.  I’m back in Vegas for the first time since the ’06 World Series.

The phrase in the title of this post is a tribute to my current Vegas roomate Matt Catapano, for whom “dear blogisphere” is a two-word mantra.  The translation, loosely, is “David’s blog is gay.”

Anyway, I never lose in Las Vegas cash games.  Hopefully my forays on this trip will not be any exception.

Am I allowed to be doing this?

‘Cause I am.

Just a short post to congratulate my longtime friend Steve-O on quitting his job at a prestigious Wall Street law firm so that he and his wife can pursue their dream of being scuba instructors somewhere in paradise. 

For those unfamiliar with my background, my first job out of law school (where I met Steve-O) was at a similar firm.  While these places compensate you very well for your services, I found the work wholly unrewarding and discovered that large law firms are where douchebags who are intelligent but are devoid of creativity or personality go to roost (no disrespect to the group of big firm friends reading this, i’m not talking about you). 

Steve-O has been talking about jumping ship (no pun intended) for a long time.  Props to him for giving something else a go.  New York will miss The O, although i’m not too sure he’ll miss New York.

I have added a link on the right side of the page labeled “Team Schmoop,” which is the name of his webpage (also designed and set up by the inimitable Jon Marston).  You can directly link to it here as well.  As you can see, Steve is much better at doing stuff with his website than I am. 

Good luck Steve and Andrea!

Unless something miraculous happens in the next two days, I have just withstood my worst month as a professional poker player.  Specifically, in January 2007, I went to the Bahamas and Borgata and played a lot of tournaments, and I got my ass handed to me in almost every one I entered.  Borgata in particular seems to be my personal house of horrors: despite comically shitty fields in every event I’ve ever played there, I can’t seem to win a dime in AC’s monstrous faux-Vegas joint.

I’m pretty bummed about this dry spell. If I had started last year out this way, I might be in court right now rather than typing this.  But it ain’t last year, and I’m not about to jump out my window or anything.  I have spent a bit of time considering what went wrong in January 2007, and here are my conclusions.

Natural Variance:  Tournaments are swingy. And by swingy I don’t mean married couples having consensual sex with each other. I mean that droughts are totally normal: a tournament player’s result charts should have big swings. By playing exclusively tournaments (rather than cash games) in January, and by putting quite a bit of tournament entry money into play, I certainly did not mitigate this factor. I can recall quite a few hands where I was bitten by bad luck. I also know that I held an unusually low number of premium hands both at Atlantis and Borgata. I usually mock people who complain too much about never being dealt aces. A good player will pick up chips regardless. Shame on me for mentioning that.

Holes In My Game:  Another thing I have noticed about this month is that I made very few creative “outside the box” plays, and when I did make a creative (read: aggressive) preflop play, I failed to follow that play up with post-flop aggression. At this point, I can play a reasonable brand of tight-aggressive poker when I’m drunk, half-asleep, eating dinner, watching TV, whatever.  Too often this month, I was in that autopilot mode.  There were situations at Borgata especially, where I should have played more hands in position, and situations where I should have reraised preflop with air.  Instead, I played surprisingly passively and let some poor players “dictate tempo” to steal a sports phrase.  Only at very rare junctures could an observer say that I was terrorizing my table.  And people who win poker tournaments terrorize their tables.

Mental State:  This one strongly correlates with the prior category.  Unfortunately, I’ve spent the last two weeks in a mental fog. In small part this is due to the accumulated effects of constantly losing, which does wear on you a bit.  It is also due to some serious frustration dealing with Neteller, which held quite a bit of my money in limbo for several weeks.  It seemed I had no recourse, but I recently was able to secure my funds through some rather cunning means.  But the larger reason has been the sudden illness and subsequent death of my parents’ dog Maggie.  I really loved that little fucker, and when I heard she was on her way out, I was overwhelmed with sadness.  I think the news reduced my focus a bit, and my game suffered.

She was a really special dog.  She had a level of intuition that most dogs are incapable of–what poker players call “second level thinking” and what lawyers might call an understanding of “proximate cause.”  Maggie was able to identify the things that deprived her of attention and eliminate them, like a petulant child.  For instance, she had no tolerance for books or newspapers.  If you began to read in her presence she would attack whatever you were reading and scratch it out of your hands.  She also knew how important the TV remote control was.  When she was feeling especially feisty, she’d grab it and hide under the bed, causing my father a lot of grief and providing the rest of us with a good laugh.  She also knew how to use her “table image” to her advantage:  Any time a person walked through the front door, she brought them a gift (usually a shoe, but sometimes a pillow). 

I remember the day my mother and I picked Maggie up as a pup. I was in my first year of law school, immobilized after having knee surgery and living at my parents’ house, so I spent a lot of time with her back then.  I helped train her and I like to think I also helped instill her with the unique persona she displayed from that time forward.  She was very affectionate, but at the same time she took no shit from anyone.  Even though she was physically diminutive, my parents’ place was Maggie’s house!  Hanging out with her whenever I’d visit my parents was one of the best things about going home for the past decade.  Seeing her bedraggled and helpless for the first time in her life in the past couple of weeks was heartbreaking.

Appreciate your pets, it’s easy to forget their life spans are much shorter than ours. RIP, Maggie May….

As for me, in the last tournament I played, I was totally on point.  In the Full Tilt $300k Guaranteed last night I found myself doing funky things like reraising fools with 10-5 offsuit, checkraising guys with air on ace-high flops, and being a general nuisance, just like Maggie.  They couldn’t run me down until there were 70 people left out of over 2100, and I almost made a huge score.  You haven’t heard the last from me.

This week, I returned to AC so that I could try and satellite into the WPT main event. From playing at the Borgata last week, I figured that the satellite fields would be fairly weak. The fields were indeed weak, but I still managed to swing and miss in both tournaments.

In these tournaments, I played well and accumulated chips through the early and middle levels. But then, in each tourney, big hands arose in which I made poor decisions that crippled me. After the fact (yeah CBO log!), it occurred to me that both hands involved a distinct internal struggle: my instincts and my training were at odds. In both instances my gut told me to take one course of action but I chose another. Both times, my decision was based on the text of books i’ve read. And both times, I should have trusted my gut.

Poker players typically just sit down and play. Most beginners play purely on instincts, with experience serving as a guiding hand, reshaping those instincts as time progresses. Not entirely so for me. Since I have read at least twenty poker books (some of them several times), I can often cite the reason I am making a certain play, along with the author who told me to make it. However, I’m not a computer and I do have underlying instincts. My game is not totally pre-programmed by books and videos.

Instinctively, I am a very tight, conservative player. In a vacuum, priority number one for me is to protect my stack and avoid confrontations. Come to think of it, this “instinct” might not be 100% inborn. The very first book about tournament poker that I ever read was T.J. Cloutier’s book, which preaches super-tight conservative play and counsels against unecessary risk taking. Frankly, this book is complete garbage when applied to the modern tournament scene, and reading it before I read any other books probably set me back a good deal. It was only when I expanded my tournament poker library that I opened up my game and began to see results.

In any event, whether it is my own doing, T.J.’s doing, or some combination, my hard-wiring says to avoid big confrontations in tournaments. However, it is also indisputable that selectively welcoming big confrontations is required to win poker tournaments. So at certain junctures in a tournament, a little war is being waged in my head. Sometimes my gut says one thing while page 157 of Harrington On Hold ‘Em says another. Here are the two hands from the supersats where I should have obeyed Mr. Gut:

Supersatellite #1:

About half the field is gone. The blinds are 200-400 with a 50 ante. I have an average stack of about 12,000. My table is broken and I’m moved to a new one. The most exciting thing about my new seat, incidentally, is that it is located two seats to the left of the one being occupied by Captain Tom Franklin.  (Google “Tom Franklin” and “Brandi Hawbaker” for some background). At this new table, about 10 hands are played, none of which really give me a read on what’s going on. Then I am dealt JJ in middle position. I make a standard raise to 1200, and the player three seats to my left, who has about 8,500 chips, makes a reraise to 3200.  I have absolutely no read on this player. Everyone else folds.

My gut was screaming that he had a big hand and was making a small reraise to entice action, and that I should therefore either fold, or call, then check-fold if I don’t flop a set. 

However, this type of situation is discussed in several books (among them Harrington’s, Erick Lindgren’s, and the Kill Phil book). Each of those books states that big hands only come around every once in a while, and that you simply have to play them, especially when the blinds are large in proportion to you stack. Harrington’s book also states that when you have no particular read on a player, you should never discount the possibility that he is bluffing. He states that players can and do make strange moves, even if they don’t appear to make any sense. While my instinct said “get away!” these two concepts were telling me to go ahead and play the hand. In an effort to talk myself into the book-learned play, I also told myself that since I was in a supersat, I needed to accumulate a lot of chips soon. Further, I noted that this player could not bust me. After perhaps 40 seconds of internal back-and-forth, I finally pushed all my chips in, my opponent called and showed KK, and I was crippled. 

Supersatellite #2:

Once again, about half the field is gone and the blinds are 200-400 with a 50 ante. My stack is at around 5500 and fading fast. My table draw was very favorable, and there are many bad players. One of the bad players is a total nit–a very conservative player that is scared to put his chips in play. He has me covered and is in the big blind when I pick up pocket queens in middle position. I am technically in all in-or-fold territory, but I know that most of the players at the table, including the big blind, are not savvy enough to know this. I instead raise to 1000 in order to induce action. Everyone folds to the big blind, who calls.

The flop is Q-10-x with two diamonds, giving me top set. The big blind checks, and I desperately need him to catch something (flush draw be damned), so I check behind. The turn is the ace of clubs, and the big blind bets 400 into the 2500-chip pot. I put him on a weak ace and flat call. The river is the jack of spades, making the board A-Q-J-10-x. My set of queens no longer looks so good when the big blind fires 2000 into the pot. From almost any other player, I would instacall this bet, because a bluff is very possible in light of the prior action. However, this player was a very scared player who was clearly uncomfortable playing in a tournament of any magnitude. My gut began to scream “fold!” but I’ve been trained to calculate pot odds and not to discount the possibility of a bluff. Both these factors made this an obvious call. But somehow calling didn’t feel right. I called anyway. Despite being virtually certain I was beat.  The nit showed A-K and took down the pot, crippling me. Unbelievably, he didn’t reraise all in preflop with big slick.         

A few years ago, prior to my exhaustive exploration of poker manuals, I would have laid down both of the hands I desribed without much thought. I would have felt beat and thus simply gotten away. My education actually was detrimental in those two hands. But before I can curse those stupid books, I need to remember that I probably never would have advanced as far in those two tournaments without them. 

I think good tournament players understand all the important NLHE tourney concepts, most of which have now been written about in books I’m very familiar with. The really great tournament players not only understand these concepts, but also know the exact right times to disregard them, trust their gut and go with their read of specific situation and do something unorthodox. I’m still fine-tuning the delicate balance between my knowledge and my “feel.” I owe my lack of success on this trip to the fact that my game isn’t 100% fine-tuned.