Pokersavvy, LAPC, and There Will Be Blood
by Bond18 on 02/10/08
Over the last couple of days I’ve made my first two videos for the training site www.pokersavvy.com. The first one I made yesterday followed my run in the Tilt $150 and 30 rebuys as well as whatever random tables I brought over. The $150 is a pretty wild video since I’m in the 5-12 BB range almost the entire video and every chance I get to get a hold of some serious chips I get 3 outed down to 1.5 BB’s (seriously it happened twice and I just kept sucking out to come back) and arrive at the final table with all of 4 BB’s, swearing about how stupid it all is. Today’s video goes on a much more smooth ride as I turned it on with about 8 left in the UB 30 rebuys and ended up winning the tournament for just under $5,000. Meanwhile Kyle (Edmond Dantes) has made coming out to the LAPC as alluring as possible in order to promote the new ‘Live at the Bike’ internet video feed we’ll be doing. To be honest though I’m pretty exhausted of travel and I told myself after getting home from Gold Coast that I’d really settle in and start doing some very serious tournament grinding, which having done so has been a major success. I think I’m up something like ~$8,000 this week, though considering how many tournaments I play anything from 6-10,000 wouldn’t surprise me. Besides, I have the Joe Hachem $2500 deep stacked semi shoot out event on Wednesday and Valentines Day on Thursday. Besides, I have flabby pounds to shed and sitting around on my ass in a plane and at the poker table all day isn’t going to help.
Meanwhile I finally got to see ‘There Will Be Blood’ last night, the last of the ‘best picture’ nominees I had yet to see. The film is both miniature and enormous, and highly metaphorical, but is so violent and gritty that it never comes off pretentious. Day-Lewis deserves all the awards he’s got coming this year, though the film is certainly not for those who only see films for the relaxing, escapist amusement they so often are. ‘Blood’ is a very serious film almost entirely devoid of amiable characters, a film where the characters spend so much time spewing hate and violence at each other that you could never think of naming anyone in the film ‘the good guy’.
Meanwhile, Dhubermex, who does the Podcast interviews for www.pocketfives.com has asked me consider writing two articles a month for them. As much as I enormously enjoy creative writing (especially if it results in my attention whoring side being lauded) the one thing I get concerned with is being repetitive or unoriginal. Even though I was quite happy with how ‘The JJ Diaries’ turned out, I get the feeling that all my comedic writing thus far (outside the ‘upcoming live poker article’) has been very similar. Outside writing an ‘upcoming live poker part 2’ as soon as the APPT schedule comes out, I’m not sure I’d write anything comedic again unless something really jumped out at me or I had some idea of how to do something in an entirely different style.
As far as strategy writing goes though, the ‘things it took me a while to learn’ series will certainly continue for quite some time, as there are so many facets of tournament poker strategy we can delve into, as well as the potential to do a number of articles that are nothing but example hands to clarify certain points. I’m in the process of writing part 15 on table image and I imagine that will get finished either tonight or two days from now (seeing as tomorrow is Sunday in the states I can’t see having enough energy or being in the mood to write afterwards.) Even strategy though is a little tougher to write than before. When I started the series I had some very concrete ideas about what I wanted to write about, the most obvious flaws in play I constantly see. At this point we’re running out of major topics to talk about and are soon approaching writing about certain small leaks that need to be plugged.
It seems to me that the vast majority of poker strategy writers are either lazy, hacks, or both. I see so many articles in the largest publications, that even if appealing to beginners, are amazingly shit or repetitive. As much as I have always thought Mike Caro’s book of tells was an excellent piece of work every article he’s written on tells for the past 10 years has been the exact same fucking thing. I read an article in ‘Bluff’ magainze a while ago by ex-FBI agent Joe Navarro, another ‘tells’ guy. In his article he advised players not only go to the poker room to play poker but to simply stand around for a couple hours watching the game and observing peoples tells. ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS??? Whatever tiny EV you gain by knowing peoples tells ahead of time is massively negated considering the opportunity cost by not playing at the same time you are watching people. Besides, tells are clearly the most exaggerated piece of poker strategy in the history of the game. Technical and mathematical knowledge is oh, I don’t know, about 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 times more important than knowing if some guys pupils dilating slightly shifts his ranges weight towards the stronger end. Looking at that number again, I’m probably missing several lines of zeros.
Sometimes I think the majority of poker literature out there is published by a big group of guys who got together and decided “Well, we better not let the fish get their hands on any good information. Let’s publish the same shit over and over and over until we’ve reinforced all those terrible habits to the absolute maximum and we’ll all be rich forever! HAHAHAHAHA!” I imagine they all then ate several live puppies.
My imagination brings up another important question, am I ‘tapping the glass’ too much? By making quality information (though yes, I’m sure some of it is flawed in some regards) available for free and putting it in the area where the absolute maximum amount of unskilled but wanting to learn players will look, am I only hurting my own and other good players bottom lines? Maybe, maybe ever so slightly. Assuming anything more would be highly arrogant about my own writing prowess, the quality of my strategy, and the audience I reach. It’s not like staying ahead of the curve is all that hard. Besides, for every one guy who wants to learn and incorporates said information into his play, there’s 100 more that will either never find it or even if they do completely fail to understand or execute it. The final table I made today was a perfect example of that, I mean holy God every single player on that table was just totally incompetent about so many aspects. As far as I can tell, over the last six months tournaments have gotten softer, not tougher. Sure there was a stage post UIGEA where it did seem like they were getting a bit tougher, but the paranoia about that has died down and there’s way more tournaments with big fields today than I could have ever imagined a year ago. Just look at the 100 rebuys on Sunday, that thing used to get like 200-250 players. A few months later and the thing is getting 500 fucking guys! That’s just insane to me.
Anyway, my would be 1 page blog entry has turned into a four and a half page rant. Tomorrow is Sunday which means I need to get to bed early, and I’ve got some very serious Halo 3 to play before bed time.
Comments
lakeoffire says
I don't think you are tapping too much because there are plenty of guys who think they have it all figured out. A huge number of people can't even admit when they are wrong, as long as there is "pride" there will be fish. Keep writing for the rest of us who always know there is room for improvement.02/10/08
Mr_Taterhead says
I to think that "tells" are vastly overrated. When one fish gets decent there is always going to be two more new fishes in the sea. Bring them on. More the marry.02/10/08
Anonymous says
Bond - It's one of those Catch-22 situations - I don't want this information getting out to the fish, but I don't want you to stop putting it out there either, otherwise I can't lap it up like the greedy poker animal that I am. Your writings to me are the cosmic force which I (naturally) select to help evolve my poker DNA. Survival of the poker fittest. And as long as you keep putting these milkshakes out there I will drink them up (a "There Will Be Blood" nod though I haven't yet seen the flick). Keep up the good work man!02/19/08
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