What Are Your Problem Areas?
I’m getting ready to take a trip to Florida for a conference required by my “real job.” But before I go, I wanted to ask something.
What are your biggest challenges in poker?
What is it that you think is keeping you from making the money you want to make at the tables? Your comments will help guide my future articles and videos.
Here are two tests to help you if you’re not sure where your weaknesses are:
I look forward to hearing from you.
The Importance of Review Sessions: Part 1
Reviewing your play is the most important thing you can do to improve your poker game. You know it’s true and still you don’t do it.
You tell yourself all kinds of lies.
- I just need more experience at the tables.
- I don’t make money when I’m reviewing my hands.
- I already know what I did wrong.
- I don’t make mistakes. (If you say that, just kill yourself now.)
You are losing money if you don’t review your play. Of course, there is one valid excuse for not reviewing your play – you don’t know how.
If that’s the case, I’m going to change that.
How to Review Sit ‘N Go Sessions
Sit ‘N Goes are the easiest games to review. There’s no line balancing, no real post-flop play; just value raises and shoves.
There are tons of articles across the net that will tell you what hands you should play during the different stages of a SNG. Despite what I may have said in an earlier article, the right way to play the early stages of a SNG is super tight.
You’re basically waiting for premium hands and that’s it. It’s the late stages of a Sit ‘N Go that get interesting.
In the late stages of a SNG, you’ll shove AJo, K7o, T8o and worse. Whether or not your shove is correct will depend on your position, the action, the stack sizes, the size of the blinds, how loose or tight your opponent is and how many players are left. It’s a lot of information to digest, fortunately there’s a mathematical model that takes all these factors into account: the Independent Chip Model.
The Independent Chip Model is too complicated to figure out using a pen and paper. Fortunately, Sit ‘N Go grinders can just import their tournaments to SitNGo Wizard and easily find their mistakes (there’s a 30-day free trial too. This software is REQUIRED for all serious SNG players). Once you import your tournaments, SNGwiz will tell you which shove/fold situations you got right and which ones you botched. There’s even a simulator for you to get a feel for when to shove.
Of course, there are situations that SNGwiz can’t figure out. For example, if you want to know if you made the right move raising with the intention of folding to a shove, you’ll have to do a little more work.
Let’s say you have a $3000 stack with 5 players left and the blinds are 60/120. It folds around to you in the small blind. Your opponent is a very tight-aggressive regular with 1800 chips. You think he’ll shove over your raise with 20% of his hands. Should you raise to steal?
If you raise to $360, you’re risking 300 chips to win 180. In 100 trials, you’ll win 180 chips 80 times (180*80=14400) and you’ll lose 300 chips 20 times (300*20=6000) which means that your steal has a positive expected value of 84 chips. (14400-6000=8400/100=84).
Next you can use an ICM calculator to see how that chip gain will affect your equity.
Now you have no excuse not to review your Sit ‘N Go sessions. Not only did I tell you how to do it, I gave you a link to a free 30-day trial of the best Sit ‘N Go software on the market.
In the next part of this series, I’ll talk about reviewing your cash games.
Great Poker Comic
I was surfing around the net and found a great poker comic strip called +EV. If you want to see more of them, go to http://plusev.keenspot.com.
The strip below is one of my favorites. Looks just like my laptop.
If I Had To Do It Again
Building my bankroll from $100 to a little over $4,000 has been a lot of fun, but there were frustrating moments too. My aggressive growth goals meant that I had to play a range of different games and play buy-ins that violated traditional bankroll management rules. Through it all I learned a lot about what games were good for bankroll building and which ones were a little too risky. Here’s what I’d do if I had to do it all over again.
Start With Low Buy-in SNGs
Playing low buy-in Sit ‘N Goes is like printing money – very, very small amounts of money. The players in these games have no idea what the Independent Chip Model is or what it means to adjust to rising blind levels. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure they know they’re playing poker.
All you have to do in low buy-in SNGs is play super tight. You only play JJ+ and AK in the early stages and when you’re stack is about 10 to 13 blinds deep, you use the ICM to make +EV shoves. That’s all there is to it.
Move to Low and Mid Buy-in Turbos
These turbos are similar to the regular SNGs except there’s even less post-flop play involved. In fact, if you’re playing post-flop poker after the early stages of a turbo Sit ‘N Go, you’re probably making a mistake.
Turbos are all about knowing when to shove.
Add Some Multi-Table Tournaments
Once your bankroll can handle the swings, some multi-table tournaments will give your bankroll a serious boost. Multi-table tournaments offer winning players an excellent return on invest and going deep in a few tournaments will make your bankroll soar.
I prefer tournaments with less than 300 players. You’ll usually have to go to fringe sites like Bodog or Cake to get decent tournaments without a field of several thousand players, but it’s worth moving your money. Moreover, the skills you learned while playing SNGs will help you crush final tables.
Bum Hunt in Cash
Start low at first. Maybe $50 NL or so. Go to PokerTableRatings.com and find the worst players on your site and set up email alerts (it helps if you have an iPhone or Blackberry so you can be instantly notified). When your fish are playing, just grab a seat in position.
This method can be a little high variance, but it’s profitable in the long run.
Get Rakeback
I’ve earned hundreds of dollars in rakeback over the course of my bankroll building challenge. I’d have a lot less money if I didn’t sign up for rakeback right away. If you’re playing without rakeback, go here. All you have to do is enter your info in the ‘Existing Account’ field and these guys can get you set up. It doesn’t work with Full Tilt, but it usually works with everything else.
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I truly believe that anyone can make money playing poker. There’s too much information out there (and on this site) for lack of knowledge to be an issue. Good luck and let me know if you have any question. I’d love to help!
My First Poker Video
I just sent out a broadcast email with a link to my first free poker video and while I’m proud that I finally pulled the trigger on it, I think I played pretty terrible in the video. Fortunately I chose to do the analysis post-mortem so I was able to point out what I did wrong and what I could have done better.
I learned something making the video. Forcing action is always a losing move. I only had one table up since this was my first video and I wanted to keep it simple, but I found that I was trying to make moves that I wouldn’t normally make just to make things more interesting. It usually didn’t work out.
Poker players have a reputation for being a prideful group that likes to brag about how much they make or what great moves they can pull off, but the best quality for a player to have is patience.
I’m not saying that you always have to wait for a big hand to enter the pot. I’m just saying that you have to wait for the right situation when you’re ready to make a move.
From now on I plan on keeping at least two tables open for my videos and maybe as many as four. That should be enough that I’ll always have an interesting situation come up or something different to talk about.
If you missed this broadcast, make sure you sign up now so you’ll get my next one. I’d be happy to hear your feedback or requests. My hope is that these videos help me improve my game as much as they help others improve theirs.
