Bryce is "In the Well"

[The Bryce]

Alright, so I'm next up "In the Well." I'll answer your questions as candidly as possible, but I may not answer quite everything (though everything will receive some sort of an answer). The one thing off the top of my head that I will not discuss is specific edges against people I play, but other than that everything else should be fair game.

[GSykes]

first....etc.

poker story?

[scorer]

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

[kickabuck]

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?

[DeathDonkey]

What adjustments do you make preflop (HU) vs a tough player who is 3 betting out of the BB with a bit too wide a range (or do you think there is no such thing as too wide if you tailor your game around that style) - an 80/60 type guy who plays fairly well postflop.

There are a ton of HU pros who bounce between like 10/20 and 50/100 on Full Tilt. What are they doing wrong or what is exploitable in their play that is keeping them from HU superstardom. (if that's too broad I'm trying to categorize the player type who is clearly decent at HU, winning for the most part, but not quite able to be the next Freedom25 - what's holding them back?)

Thanks,
DeathDonkey

[DaveyDonk]

Is your foray into HU NL going to have any chance of being your main game at some point, or are you going to stick with limit primarily and just make this your "project"?

[The Bryce]

[ QUOTE ]
What adjustments do you make preflop (HU) vs a tough player who is 3 betting out of the BB with a bit too wide a range (or do you think there is no such thing as too wide if you tailor your game around that style) - an 80/60 type guy who plays fairly well postflop.

There are a ton of HU pros who bounce between like 10/20 and 50/100 on Full Tilt. What are they doing wrong or what is exploitable in their play that is keeping them from HU superstardom. (if that's too broad I'm trying to categorize the player type who is clearly decent at HU, winning for the most part, but not quite able to be the next Freedom25 - what's holding them back?)

Thanks,
DeathDonkey

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, backing down and contesting less pots isn't the right answer. It's important to remember that you can really leverage your position to bump up your implied the times you do flop a hand, and it's basically impossible for your opponent to "exploit" you by 3 betting a lot unless you roll over and die. Keep an eye open for spots where you can win pots UI post-flop start capping light as a semi-bluff if you think that's an appropriate counter.

Don't have an concrete answer to your second question, since I'm not really familiar with those players. One thing that I find is pretty common with a lot of players, however, is that their ideas of how poker works basically amount to educated guessing. You can always use mathematics to find the best possible line based off what you assume your opponent will do, so if you can't draw a straight line from your assumptions to the best possible actions you're going to want to seek out those gaps in your thinking and fill them in to make sure you have accurate data.

[ QUOTE ]
Is your foray into HU NL going to have any chance of being your main game at some point, or are you going to stick with limit primarily and just make this your "project"?

[/ QUOTE ]

It's a largely academic project at this point, but I do find it quite interesting. One thing that is interesting is that after you get over that first bit of the learning curve where you have to take things like implied odds and bet-sizing into account NL is in many ways a much simpler game than limit, since there are generally far fewer actions per hand.

[ QUOTE ]
Hi The Bryce. Thanks for going into The Well.

What are the biggest BB downswings you have had at a couple limits? How did you feel about them?

Who do you think are the best limit hold 'em players in the world? HU and in longer versions of the game. Online and live.

What do you believe are the best poker books ever written? Which helped your game the most? Have you read Mathematics of Poker? If so, what did you think of it? Did it improve your game?

Do high stakes players take advantage of reload bonuses at the online sites? For example, do they bother with the Stars or FTP 125 dollar bonus every 5 months or whatever? If yes, and they don't appear to have received their bonus, do they bother e-mailing support to find out why?

You are hosting a poker game. You may pick the number of seats and the stakes. You can choose to invite absolutely any person ever living or deceased and they will accept. Who do you invite and what stakes will you play?


[/ QUOTE ]

I know when I was propping I had a downswing of something like 700BB (note that dollar-wise it would have been a pretty marginal loss) and playing HU I don't think I've ever had a swing of more than 250BB. In the case of the first one I had a pretty depreciating attitude about it, but in the case of more recent swings swinging one way or the other is kind of low-impact psychologically. Not just because the downswings are smaller, but because at this point my mathematical fundamentals are strong enough that I can more or less see where the money is going, and am just happy to get it in good / worry about the quality of my play.

Live I can't say. Online I can't say out of everyone, but out of the people who play regularly and who I have experience with I would say either Hoss or myself for HU (note that I haven't had a chance to play against TLK). For 6max I play so seldom these days that I can't really say.

I recently bought The Mathematics of Poker, but have yet to sit down and give it some attention. In terms of other poker books the issue I have with them is that they mostly focus on teaching exploitative strategy based off certain assumptions of what people are likely to do. When the game conditions change most of the advice given in them isn't all that useful, and even though they usually do include information on under what conditions you might vary your play they don't really do a very good job of teaching the student how to understand how the game actually works. These sorts of books are still necessary material for beginner and amateur players, however, since a more mathematical approach to poker would be an extremely steep learning curve to conquer at the beginning. When reading "Theory and Practice" however, I did think that David did a much better job of focusing on fundamentals and the mechanics of the game than in any other book I'd read to date.

I just settle for rakeback.

Well, I think one of the important parts of gaming is being able to decline action, so grabbing a guy off the street and having him play 3000/6000 HU isn't really something I'd be up for, but basically I'd want a HU LHE game with huge stakes and the softest opponent possible.

[ QUOTE ]
What do you charge for coaching?

If you had to start over what would your bankroll plan be?

[/ QUOTE ]

Currently I charge $600/hr and give Stoxpoker members a $500/hr discount. Note that I am currently not accepting new students due to increasing demands on my time (no PMs, please).

At micro-limits I would probably start with ring LHE and then would switch it over to HU LHE around the 2/4 level.

[Heisenb3rg]

Ive been told you like to calculate the best strategy in a lot of sitautions away from the table.

Do you find by putting in this work youve come to a lot of valuable insights that couldn't have been found any other way?

I did a calculation for an article im currently writing for the two plus two magazine. I was blown away by how long it took to do the math. The math consisted of enumerating all hand combinations for every possible turn card.. About 7 pages of work in total. The time invested didnt seem worth the result.

Is there any techinques/methods youve been using to speed up the calculation process?

[The Bryce]

[ QUOTE ]
first....etc.

poker story?

[/ QUOTE ]

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.

[ QUOTE ]
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

[/ QUOTE ]

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.

[ QUOTE ]
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?

[/ QUOTE ]

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.

[Allday Everyday]

Hi The Bryce. Thanks for going into The Well.

What are the biggest BB downswings you have had at a couple limits? How did you feel about them?

Who do you think are the best limit hold 'em players in the world? HU and in longer versions of the game. Online and live.

What do you believe are the best poker books ever written? Which helped your game the most? Have you read Mathematics of Poker? If so, what did you think of it? Did it improve your game?

Do high stakes players take advantage of reload bonuses at the online sites? For example, do they bother with the Stars or FTP 125 dollar bonus every 5 months or whatever? If yes, and they don't appear to have received their bonus, do they bother e-mailing support to find out why?

You are hosting a poker game. You may pick the number of seats and the stakes. You can choose to invite absolutely any person ever living or deceased and they will accept. Who do you invite and what stakes will you play?