[ofishstix]

It has been a little over four years since I started playing poker and about three years since I’ve done so online. In this time, I’ve learned and forgotten a bunch of ideas and concepts. Some things my friends and I learned/reasoned out were right, others were terrible wrong. In terms of advice, though, there is one piece that is so important I’ll never forget it…

I got to durrrr’s house around midnight when he was playing some 200/400 PLO. He was already up 600k on the day and was about to cal it a night. After he finished up his sesh, we went out to take care of some things. In the car he was telling me how soft the heads up games on Prima were. “They’re all sports betters who like gambling. Sit at 5/10, find a fish, and they never stop reloading. I’ll take half your action.” I three tabled 3/6 6 max, 5/10 full ring, and 5/10 HU. He was helping me out with the HU match as I had never played HU NL outside of SNGs.

This is when I learned that limping the button is fine. If you’re going to get called anyway, why would you want to bloat the pot with marginal hands like 45s? Limp and outplay your opponent postflop. Good advice, but not exactly epiphany-type stuff.

Though I don’t remember the exact hand, I remember the lesson it prompted. I hadn’t 3bet preflop in a while so I decided to do it with something marginal like J9o. durrrr asked me why I did that and I told him that I hadn’t 3bet in a while so I thought it would be a good time. He told me:

Always have a good reason for everything you do

Don’t 3bet for the sole reason you haven’t done so in a while. Don’t bluff raise the flop just because you haven’t done that lately. You must reason out every move you make. Doing so will make you play more actively/not in autopilot mode. You will constantly be analyzing your play and improving. It will help prevent you from making terrible, tilty, and spewy plays because you’re not just acting on a whim, you’re consciously reasoning through your options.

Despite the great advice, I still ended up being down 4k because I lost one 200bb and two 400bb coin flips. Now owing him 2k, I decided to take a nap and .5% of his session. I woke up a few hours later and durrrr was up 400k which covered my debt. That day, in fact, turned out to be his famous million-dollar-day. Though I broke even that day, the lesson helped me make plenty over the last 10 months. In addition to poker, this lesson can be applied to everything. It’s much harder to make a poor decision when you think through it first.

Good luck,
ofishstix