Every Little Edge

Advancing in poker requires taking on every little edge to make a bit more and to appear more loose. When a very tight player bets, he has a good hand and the other players tend to fold more, and the tight player gets no action to recover from all the blinds he contributed to.

Beginners are advised to avoid playing marginal hands and thus have a smaller range of hands to play.  When a beginner has a good hand, he has to maximize the winnings from that hands. Small Stakes Hold 'em by Miller and Sklansky is not easy reads and in the beginning the King had to just find the essence of the book and applied them to the real money games.  The pots entered were few and far in between, the outcome of these pot battles were heart pounding because the pots were so big.

Pot odds were not important when starting to play poker and starting hands were important.  With high pot odds, more hands can be played as strange it seems.  Another strange situation is that loose games with a lot of players are easier to beat than tight games with fewer players, because when starting poker almost two years ago, the King avoided loose games.  The King played in tight passive games and playing them wrong, lost a little and his bankroll hovered between $19 to $24 continually for the first six months.  The initial deposit was $25 and he was in the red from $1 to $6 always. Progress was slow and the King was learning tools were 1) mimicking the play of Conan from Turbo Software and 2) statistical analysis of card distributions using mostly Turbo software.  Realizing that it would take several lifetimes to learn the game, the King turned to "Hold 'em for Advanced Players" and from that time (March 2009), the gains started happening.

Hold 'em for Advanced Players helped with the tight passive games but no so much with the loose games and the King struggled when switching to loose games.  The first year ended with a small gain and the achievement of a goal to make at least $5 or quit poker.  Believe it or not, playing year round and making $5+ seemed like an impossible goal.

With year two ending, and working on starting hands it as quite a surprise to have memory jolts to gameplay more than a year ago.  The King's play was like drownproofing methods where you take a small movement to get a gulp of air and submerge (survive).  Year one passed with a little luck too, if the King didn't reach his goal, he would have quit poker and returned to sports betting.