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first....etc.
poker story?
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Uh, this would be kind of a long one to answer in full, so I'll have to give you the cliff notes version [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img] I started playing online poker in early '05 (had a roomate who dealt at a local casino and at that point a lot of MTG players were jumping over to poker) read the basic literature and got a good start on the basics through a Vancouver-based website (
www.604poker.com). By late summer I was propping 5/10 LHE on prima and making a fair bit more money doing that than at my dayjob, and since I didn't care for my dayjob much (was a tedious machining job I took when I was 18 with the idea of banking money for university) I decided to drop it in favor of taking on poker full time (this was done a few months prematurely in retrospect). That sort of went on for about a year of propping on Prima, Crypto and AP, and while I was making something like 1.5BB/100 in rakeback over that period I was always frustrated that I wasn't actually producing a pokertracker winrate in these tougher games (despite having made just over 100k on the year). Towards I began to run some 20/40 (or equivalent in GPB) stuff and in the summer of '06 I decided that AP 5/10 was harder that party-poker 20/40 and pulled the majority of my funds off the propping sites and ran PP 15/30-30/60 for a few months (there was a 3 week period or so in here where I would often 5 or 6 table these games, which was a good lesson in just how expensive common, inattentive mistakes can be).
At this point "black October" jumped in with the UIGEA and PP imploded, and in the week before the legislation became effective I spent some time datamining and surfing around the other major sites. One of the things you do a lot as a prop is wait around trying to start up empty tables, and I had always played a bit of HU here and there as a result (and had enjoyed it). When I noticed that FT had heads-up cash games I thought I would give it a go, and thought it would be interesting to see what sort of money, if any, could be made by playing these games on a regular basis. I found the HU play to be much more engaging that 6handed. By the end of the year I was running 50/100 and spending at least a half hour each day watching recordings of my own play, taking notes and doing whatever I could to break things down mathematically (I had earlier come to the conclusion that the ability to get an accurate idea of what your opponent's are doing is just something you build up through experience, so the mathematics was the important stuff to focus on). The stuff between that point and now was largely much of the same: state assumptions about opponent, find best line based off assumptions, repeat.
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what is your game you prfer the most as in stakes and amt of players?? Do you prefer one site over the other?? Who have you taken poker lessons from in the past?? Will you be coming out with a book or dvd's?? Thanks Bryce
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HU LHE. I just play wherever I can get action (wiring some money into Stars shortly) though I do like the FT interface and they've always been good about processing wires. I summer '06 I asked Nate tha' Great to coach me for a bit when I was playing mid-limits, he agreed and I was extremely happy with the experience. I've actually been compiling a lot of data in the powerpoint presentations I've been doing at Stoxpoker, so producing a book at some point is not out of the question, though unlikely.
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1) Do you feel that you are approaching a place in the limit game where one could be described as virtually unexploitable?
2) I imagine you feel as though your intellectual approach to limit poker is the optimal one, however are there ways of thinking about/playing the game that you have not taken the time, or at least enough time, to explore?
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1) The thing with playing with perfect balance is that you don't win any money by doing it. I do spend a lot of time figuring out the balancing points for different situations, though, just so that I understand how much I have to let my opponents get away with, when I need to key up defense etc, or so that I can engage balanced EV neutral play in areas where my opponents play extremely well.
2) That's kind of a catch 22 in that if I thought there was something very important that I was not doing I probably would be doing it. That being said, there probably is something [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img] When I was getting started with watching a lot of my own play and doing more pen and paper work I had a lot of surplus time to leverage, but these days I'm quite a bit busier with poker / stoxpoker / other projects and just the daily non-table poker stuff that I already do. You can always do more, but now I do have to be somewhat economical about how I use my time.