Perparing For The Well (Post 1000)

[Zeldark]

My location over the past few days has been a bit of a joke.

Writing the best 1000 post ever. Lol. Right. Life has pulled me away from poker a lot this past week, so this 1,000th post will be a little more lighthearted (and perhaps shorter) than most. I hope some day to write a post that will be linked to on the big list of great posts that noobs are directed to, but this may not be that post. In any event, it will be a fast effort to sum up that which I’ve learned which newbies tend to ask from time to time, that which I haven’t noticed being addressed by other 1000 posts, and just some general advice. Metagame stuff for sure.

Alternate titles I was dealing with were “Poker is Rough,” Debating the Limitations,” and several other titles that I’ve since forgotten due to my school study induced sleep deprivation. I chose this title because I think it best embodies the heart of my poker ambition. On with the show.

Observation: Poker is Difficult
One of the things that I’ve been thinking about recently was the sheer magnitude of all the skills needed to survive at the tables long term, especially when the competition becomes somewhat educated. All sorts of skills must work together, and work together well.

Discipline for folding, nerves of steel for betting/raising, accurate perception of opponents for all sorts of things, including but certainly not limited to bluffing and check/raising, math for odds, patience for getting the right cards, wisdom for not tilting from suckouts and resisting a form of greedy which urges moving up too fast, etc. There are a great many practical lessons to learn about poker, and that list doesn’t give them all mention and none of them the attention they each deserve. On top of all that, there is that indefinable element that separates players: experience.

I have not perfected all these skills, but I am making progress. I recently came to the realization though that if I somehow knew when I started playing how much effort it would take to consistently win in the long run at the levels I’d want to play in the long run, I doubt I would have ever bothered with poker. Of course you hear “it’s a rough game” and other such ideas, none of you reading this truly believed it was as bas as they said it was when you started. (If you did, you wouldn’t be reading this on a poker forum.) If I somehow knew though, maybe I went back in time and told myself that it would take lots and lots and lots of effort, I don’t think I would’ve ever tried.

Observation: Poker is Changing
This is to address the myriad of posts that seem to be more and more frequent lately. Mainly “Is SSHE still valuable?” “How do I adjust my starting hands from this chart thingy?”and “Will I ever find a soft table again?!” For those with aspirations of getting into the higher limits, this in a way brings the higher stakes to you (without the higher stakes risk/reward). Still, there are several things to be said about the affects of your play/studies due to the games drying/tightening up. Some things change, some things don’t.

1) You had better still use pot odds. SSHE still has tons of information you’ll be keeping with you no matter what stakes you play. Assessing the strength of your hand and draw is invaluable. The categories of the starting hands, and the properties of them, the opposition they prefer and what reduces their value. You should never forget this information. With a little reasoning, you can realize which categories become more or less important as the game conditions change. SSHE is and will always be the first book I recommend to any new student of the game. When a better book is written for such a thing, I’ll believe it when I see it.

2) The more intelligent, skilled, or otherwise difficult that your opponents get, the more you should be relying on a different book: HEPFAP.

3) The games recently have been reported getting softer. Like it’s a phenomenon. I shall save how I got interested in poker for another time, but it was a fluke really. When this fluke occurred though and my interest in poker grew, it’d have been late 2005, and the games were much softer. They may not be that soft again anytime soon, but conditions change for the population, conditions change for the poker population. I’m sure this argument could be argued against, but logically if the games were to always be as tight or tighter than the time before it, you’d eventually boil down to the point where everyone was folding to the blinds unless they had Aces. Since this isn’t happening, there is softening.

At this point in time, I’m fairly tired and would just like to post this and go to sleep. Therefore, I shall end this with a few book recommendations and call it a post. Though I’m guessing a lot of you already have at east 2 of them.

Limit Hold’em:
Small Stakes Hold’em
Hold’em Poker For Advanced Players

For NL ring/donkaments:
Harrington On Hold’em V1-3. (Volume 3 works best with the first 2)
No Limit Hold’em Theory and Practice

For General Poker:
Theory of Poker
The Psychology of Poker

Other forms:
High-low-split poker
<font color="gray">Seven Card Stud for Advanced Players is still being read, good so far</font>

And I love this book so much it gets its own category:
Inside the Poker Mind

So I started with good effort! I would’ve liked to add more posts to it, but there’s always poo-bah, CT, and custom title posts for that, aside from just feeling helpful of course. Really, there are better 1.000 posts, but hey, whatever. Discuss.

[martybonus]

nh.

convinced me all the more that staying below 2/4 is entirely sensible.

[OziBattler]

this should be a good read for the noobs. thx Z.

I too stumbled into poker by chance and then into real money one night when I got sick of freerolls and decided to try my credit card for a deposit thinking that it wouldnt work...it did.

after a few months of playing the stars nanos i got frustrated and then learned that cashing out to a credit card is hard to do. So I decided to put in some effort, get LLH and get better at poker to a point where I could crush the nanos.

There is alot more to poker than just using a preflop chat and pretending one is good at postflop poker.

what I mean is, this forum is great but I do think that noobs need to read at least one basic book so that they can gel together the advice received here.