Brief is the Light

Alrighty, so as promised, here's some stuff about my recent realizations. I make it quick post as I don't feel like writing too much right now. A friend of mine recently said something in his blog about his progress along the lines of "My skills have been developing in big leaps, but I'm not sure if the things I learn are the ones I need to beat the low stakes." I think that's pretty well put. CardRunners videos, and reading HSNL forums does develop the understanding of the game and it's all coming together, making sense. However, lots of the stuff is too fancy for this normal calling stationy micro-grinding.

So I was having this conversation with a pretty good finnish player, who -I think- concentrated the whole essence of Small Stakes poker into one sentence:
"People at SSNL make a lot more bad calls than bad bets."

It's really that simple. I think this could be one of those "intuitively clear" facts, but hearing it out loud made it think of my game by a lot. The fact that guy's an idiot doesn't mean that he doesn't have a hand when he bets, but he often calls with hopeless hands. So basically their what if-calling range is bigger than their betting range.

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Knowing that and having my hopes and confidence up again, I step in the tables again. It was a slow money drainage - I'm not quite sure why, but I think it was variantific. I also made a couple of questionable calls. Gimmey them comments on these:

TPTK on gay board. I figured that the turn check induced a bet on the river. But after talking to a friend, he convinced me that I could probably fold it. I don't beat a lot in the end games. I only beat hands he probably would've bet the flop with.

Overpair on tripsing board. Okay, I think reraising pf might've been the correct line here. Turn and river were ghayish. I tried to control the potsize by betting the turn, planning on folding to a raise since that's semi-obvious bigger overpair. I really don't know whether I should fold the river here. The opponent here had been a pain in my ass the whole session (and for the matter another session too). He cold called my raises from position and played fairly well postflop (compared to the average field). Anyway, I dunno, maybe river is C/C or C/F.

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Alrighty so that's it for this post, I had a few other ideas too, but I guess my biggest "revelation" or "re-learning experience" was the bet/call-range thing. Today, I'll go to play some O8 or FR Hold'em, depending on how many tables are up. $90 more of the bonus to clear and if I manage to break even, I'll end up positive of the promotion and it's really all I can ask now. The client just kills me and I think being frustrated and playing with a sucky client isn't a +EV combination - especially for me. Fun thing is that the hand histories are all stored in one file. So they blend in and you can't really make out one session of it, it's all just a big blur! Yay, well done Boss Media, well done.

A well. Cheers!