I finally finished the Harrington on Hold ‘em: Vol. III. If you don’t know, it’s basically a workbook to further study the lesson of the previous two volumes. In this you take multiple choice quizzes of poker problems taking from real world examples and then Harrington gives you his thoughts and points for each answer, based on his expertise (I base my quizzes on his model).

Well after 50 questions (each having an average of 4 or so parts), I ended up with a final score of 422 out of 591. According to Harrington, this puts me at “A very good player who should show a solid profit in big tournaments.”

Fair enough. I think my tournament play is usually solid… I mean, I have obvious brain farts sometimes, but usually I’m a tight/aggressive patient player. Tournaments are clearly where I have the best grasp of the game. I still need to improve my cash game, especially at the casino, as I seem to lose money more often than win (course, we’re talking about a small sample size… but still).

I was reading an interview with Annette Obrestad, the youngest player ever to win a WSOP event and now the all time leading female cash leader… anyway among many interesting things that she talked about, she was asked about cash games and she said she doesn’t play them. Ever. She doesn’t like them and doesn’t do well in them.

So maybe I just don’t have the innate ability to play cash games… however, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t keep trying to improve that ability. I have to believe that improving any area of poker ability has to improve your ability in every other area. Perhaps it opens new neural pathways that make thinking about poker easier each time you have to make a decision.

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