foxicoxi

I had a quick flick through the articles, as ive already read them ages ago. Ive also watched the video, and now watching the coaching vid.

What is your motivation for playing poker?

I started playing out of curiosity and boredom, but found I enjoyed playing, especially the psychological and mathematical aspects. Of course part of me wanted to earn some dough, but I kept trying to get rich quick such as entering tourneys, failing, then quitting. Having coming back to the game again and again, ive realised that id rather take my time and play properly.

What are your weaknesses when playing poker?

Mostly tilt. I keep concentrating on earning back lost money, and raising the stakes to compensate. I also suffer from insomnia and tend to drink a lot so I should learn to limit when to play. When in a game, I could do with concentrating more, bluffing less, and stop making unjustified assumptions.

What does it mean to play tight aggressive?

TAG means limiting play to the best hands only, and playing offensively when they do occur. In theory this works because on a long enough timeline, the style is statistically profitable, playing the best hands and bringing in the most money. I find it can be quite predictable though, and when you do finally play aggressively, everyone knows you’ve got good cards.

Thought this would be a handy place to keep record of my bankroll aswell. Ill had money switching about between room for ages, so ill start fresh from now.

10/07/12
Poker room - PokerStars
Bankroll - $29.75 (Initial Deposit)
Chosen Game - 0.01/0.02 NL Full Ring $2.00 buy-in

Im taking it slow for now, one game at a time restricted sessions, so i can pay more attention to theory and get used to the room as havnt used PokerStars before.

Wish me luck

Welcome to the Course and Best of Luck. Good job! Homework #1 Done!

Every nickname is somehow special, mine is taken totally randomly. ♦

Easiest way to fight against tilt is to set up stop-loss technique. Which means if you for example have lost more than 3BIs for a session then you just stop the session for some time. The BI amount is set up from your own results. Some may put it higher, some lower. Also after the stop you can spend some time with evaluation part to become better.

Another option against tilt is to set yourself shorter sessions which might avoid you from tilting. If you playing longer sessions then it's more likely that during that session you can get upset. So work on your game and try to find out what makes you tilt and try to fight against it.

Most of the weakness you wrote can easily be fixed by posting hands (analyzing your session). We will start writing feedback to your play. Usually negative feedback will put you into thinking phase and trying to fix all those leaks. It's almost the same as you lose money, you will remember it more than winning part. By this situation it's gonna be that negative feedback you gonna remember and try to avoid them next time.

Insomnia might be annoying but it might be cause of your life-style or have you found any specific reason? Living a not healthy life may cause that as well. But who am I, I don't really know about it much, rather stop here. ♦

Tight style is usually called playing selected hands. Like following the Starting Hand Chart. Aggressive should be also pretty clear that already the word says how you should be playing. But the problem playing aggressively is that you have to watch that you don't play too aggressive. Find good spots, find good targets. About The tight-aggressive strategy you can read in this article: "What is the Big Stack Strategy?"

Hopefully you will enjoy the Course.

Thanks for the reply, heres the next lot.

What do you think you could play differently than suggested in the BSS Starting Hands Chart and why?

Firstly, the chart doesn’t account for slowplay. Which I do a lot with premium hands providing theres only one opponent, and he/she shows aggression. For this reason I would say call under the ‘if raised’ for AA, KK and AKs. I would also avoid calling a raise, even with call20, for any pair under 77 and avoid playing 44 and below altogether. A handy set of data I found the other day shows that statistically 55> will loose money over time, and from my experience this seems true. Referring to the data again (which ill post in a sec as I found it quiet usefull), suited cards are significantly more profitable than offsuit, the two of which are not very well distinguished in the chart.

Do you have any questions about your pre-flop play?

Didnt have ,any interesting hands, but heres one that came up the other day:
NL2 AKo

What is the equity of Ako against the top 5% range?

I couldn't find any information on how to calculate this myself, so had to use equilab. I turned up with 46.32% (win – 37.92%, tie – 8.41%). hopefully that's right. And im guessing by the fact that the equity is under 50%, that the hand in unprofitable.

managed to keep to the same limit so far, apart from trying pokerstars 'zoom' tables, which i wouldn't recommend. could be doing worse i guess

Bankroll - $31.13
Hands- ~1000

Good job! Homework #2 Done!

Firstly, the chart doesn’t account for slowplay. Which I do a lot with premium hands providing theres only one opponent, and he/she shows aggression.

That's a very bad idea, why would you want to slowplay with premium hands? Play straight forward and you wont lose your hand, I am pretty sure you end up losing a lot more money by overplaying your overpair than winning much more. Would definitely advice to try to post those hands for analyze.

Playing PPs can be in long run be very profitable, we could even say that you earn the most money with them (except of course KK/AA strong hands ♦). You can always try out either you play them profitable or not by check the programs either you are doing great on early position with PPs or not and base according to that. Although the problem with playing them, especially from EP if you playing FR is the case that you wont always play them profitable and very low ones I would even advice to fold as 22-55 and raise it up like 66-77+.

About Question #3:

       Equity     Win     Tie
UTG    46.32%  37.92%   8.41% { AKo }
UTG+1  53.68%  45.27%   8.41% { 88+, AJs+, KQs, AKo }

Hopefully you enjoy the Course so far.

Thanks for advice. Im trying to incorporate it into my strategy and think im making a little headway. Heres the next lot of homewrok

Question 1

Equity for KQs vs 33 pre-flop is 50.78% (win - 50.40%, tie - 38%)
With the flop shown, equity changes to 26.46% (win - 26.46%, tie - 0%)

Question 2

In this situation i would assume the opponent holds a 4 to complete his straight. It is likely his other card is high because he called the pre-flop raise. The other crads would be little use here, but there are 9 flush draw outs to cause a win and likely 3 4s left to result in a tie. 12 x2=24.
22 (investment) / 71 (pot) x 100 = 31.
pot odds (31%) are higher than draw odds (24% for turn only as opponent will likely bet again), so hero should fold.
Of course if the opponent hasn't completed his straight, draw odds will be 38% for the turn and 76% for both, so the hero should continue.
So this is mostly dependant on whether the opponent is likely to be bluffing.

Question 3

Sorry i couldn't really find any interesting hands to post, so ill add one later.

This was a bit longer between posts. since then ive reduced the amount of time i play, but increase the number of tables. I seem to be able to concentrate better that way.

bankroll - $34.92
hands - ~3000

Good job! Homework #3 Done!

Less tables is always good to have in your game. Not only cause you can concentrate more but you also often times learn a lot more from it. Especially the problem with those guys who play massive amount of tables is that they rarely analyze their game, just cause they have too many hands. ♦

About Question #1:
Preflop Equity:

Equity Win Tie
UTG 50.78% 50.40% 0.38% { KsQs }
UTG+1 49.22% 48.84% 0.38% { 3d3c }

Postflop Equity:

Board: J♠5♦3♠
Equity Win Tie
UTG 26.46% 26.46% 0.00% { KsQs }
UTG+1 73.54% 73.54% 0.00% { 3d3c }

About Question #2:
There are several occasions on turn:
a) If we take just odds for the FD and we take into account that all our odds are clean. Which means:
Total Pot = $0,91 ; We have to Call = $0,22 -> According to that it means we are getting ~4,16:1 odds. For flushdraw we would need 4:1. Which tells us that we are getting perfect odds.
b) If we consider the opponent having sets here:
Which means we have to discount outs, for example 6:c and also 3:c. Which means we have 7 clean outs so that means we need 6:1 odds. That tells us that we need ~$0,41 on river to make it profitable. If we expect the opponent being loose enough and being able to pay us no-matter what then we can do the Call here properly.
c) We might even have overcards as outs or even 4 as a out:
Although this kind of situation ain't that likely. I'd rather discount that one and either pick a) or b). Most likely towards Call.

You are doing great progress, keep going!