This is a hand from my home poker game last night. I wasn’t involved, but I watched it happen. My opinions will be stated in the comments section.
It’s in the middle stages of a sit-n-go. Two places pay. 7 of 9 players are still at the table. The blinds are $25/$50. You started with $1000, but through some bad luck, you’re now down to $640. You’re in the SB.
The action is folded to you. You look down to find 7 3
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You actually raise to $150.
The BB, a tight-aggressive type who has played pretty solid poker, looks down at their cards and pushes all-in for $590.
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You actually call. The BB shows AKo which holds up and your down to $50.
Ever since I started playing poker, I’ve wonder what goes on in the heads of top pros when they make crazy plays like re-raising with T5o or making a sick call with Q high or simply how they put all their reads together so they can consistently end up in the money or at the final table of major tournaments.
Course, when I say the above, one of the pros that should come to mind is the “Crazy Dane” Gus Hansen. He’s one of my favorite players as he constantly amazes me. Want an example? Watch the video below.
Needless to say, a window into his mind would be great and I was super excited when I found about his new book Every Hand Revealed which is a nearly hand by hand description of his march to victory at the 2007 Aussie Millions. He lets the reader inside of his head. From his brilliant bets to his embarrassing blunders.
When I first starting playing poker, I played tight as I didn’t understand the game that well… soon, after I had more experience and thousands of hands under my belt, I started playing Really-Tight-Aggressive. After tens of thousands of hands, I’ve been wanting to open my game up, but found that loosing the game up so I’m just not so predictable. This book really helped me open up my game. It moves from theoretical examples to real world examples from a real game.
This book is NOT for beginners. But, if you want to take your game to the next level, then this is the book to buy.
There’s a lot of stuff that I see in the poker rooms that just amaze me. From dealers who shouldn’t really be dealing the game because they can’t really do pot math… or worse than that, dealers who don’t follow the action correctly and then make bad decisions based on something, regardless of what the table says.
Last week, I was involved in some horrible etiquette by a player that simply topped everything I EVER seen before.
I was playing $3/$6 limit. I was in the cutoff position. Everyone is a limping sort of mood. I had a mediocre holding, so I limped as well. The button folded (or so I thought). The SB and BB call. The flop comes out. Everyone checks to me and hitting nothing on a drawing kind of flop (I didn’t have any draws, mind you), so I decide to check to.
This is where it gets weird. The button, who I thought had folded, puts a bet into the pot. The SB and BB insta-fold at about the same time I’m looking for how I missed the button still having cards in front of him. Before the dealer can even collect the folds, the button player lifts his hands to reveal that he does NOT have any cards. He takes back his bet and starts saying stuff like, “I was just joking.”
Wow.
I’m stunned. More stunning, the SB and BB simply take their cards back and never complain. The only complaint comes from a player in middle position (who’s still in the hand)…. but other than that, play continues as normal.
WTF?!
This was without a doubt the most egregious display of bad etiquette that I’ve ever seen. If I was in the SB, I would have probably raised a real fuss. Luckily, I wasn’t and therefore it didn’t really affect me one way or another… but still.
This brings us to the question of the day. What’s the worst thing you’ve EVER seen at the poker table? Leave your comments and I’ll take the best story and reward them with a great gift of Mike Caro's Book of Poker Tells (comments in other post will break ties, BTW).
Actually, contrary to lack of posting, I’ve been playing and STUDYING a lot of poker.
About a month ago, I went to Harrah’s and played like a complete donkey. I mean, the worst I’ve played since I started playing poker. It was pretty bad. Then when I got AK in the BB… and after raising it… then the flop coming down KK2… I still lost a huge stack to a stubborn guy who stuck around with pocket 2s.
Let me tell you… I was sick. But even before that, I was living up to the adage that when you can’t spot the sucker at the table, etc etc.
So, I hit the books. I hit the websites. I took time to improve my game.
A few days ago, I went to Boomtown and played a little 3/6 limit. Now, limit is very different game, but I was able to put some of my new skills to the test and made some incredibly good laydowns that allowed me to only lose $35 of my $100 buy-in after about 3 hours of play. Seriously! More about this later, but let’s just say that Liz (my friend) and I saw THREE four-of-a-kinds in 3 hours of play! Insane. I was lucky to walk out of there with only $35.
I got some book reviews coming, some quizzes and some crazy stories (no bad beat stories though!).
Recently, I won $0.50 in a Poker Stars freeroll. I’ve decided to try and grind it out into a $1000. Not an easy task. Luckily, Poker Stars has some incredibly low limit games that I could actually buy into with just a mere .50. So, I’ve been playing the .02/.04 limit hold’em games and doing fairly well… well, for starting out with .50 in my account.
Currently my balance is at $3.27. This is after a few days of play, playing for an average of about 3 hours at a time.
There’s no amazing strategy at these kind of levels. Basically, you play tight. Wait until you get a good hand and get in the pot. With monster hands, you raise raise raise. With spec hands you call. If you flop a monster, you bet. If you flop something rather weak like a pair where more than 1 or 2 people are still in the pot, check/call so you can keep the pot small. If you flop nothing, you usually get out.
In other words, it’s no brain required to play. So typically I do this while I’m working on other things (I do NOT recommend that you do this for any other level or game). But at this level, you aren’t really worrying about other people’s hand so much… they’ll bet nothing just as much as they bet the nuts… so hand reading is pretty much useless… just play your hand and when it’s obvious your beat, don’t even make the extra .04 call… just save yourself the money, regardless of pot odds.
I guess that means that I’ll have to start keeping regular updates. I wasn’t even planning on doing an experiment like this, but it sort of fell in my lap. My goal is to get it up to a $1000 before the end of the year. However, I few ground rules.
1. I will never risk my entire bankroll in one game.
2. I can only buy into tournaments and sit-n-gos that are less than 10% of my entire bankroll.
3. (Once I get to bankroll amount where I can play no-limit) I can only risk 20% of entire bankroll in any no-limit game.
So, there go. Grinding through these lower levels is sure a pain, but I guess I should have won more than $0.50 in the freeroll.
Recently, for my home game I decided to run a series of poker games. The Penguin Poker League, if you will.
This wasn’t necessarily an easy task. First I had to decide on a point system. I wanted to make it fair for people who didn’t necessarily play every week, but at the same time make it easy to understand. Also, I wanted to provide slight weight for the weekly winner. In the end, I decided on a simple system of (# of players - 1) + (+1 for the winner). This takes into account how hard it is to win in a larger field and give a bump to someone for winning.
The only thing about this system that I don’t like is that it doesn’t take into account the number of times a person plays. Maybe next series… right now though I felt that the need for keeping the system simple was over whelming as I have a lot of inexperienced players who play my weekly home game.
The next challenge after deciding how to score it was how long it should run. I wanted to make it a prize worth fighting for and hopefully time it with the fall Bayou Poker Classic at Harrah’s. I decided in the end to run it 23 weeks and take out $20 each game. The last game, the 23rd game, will be a large buy-in event for double points. That way, it possible that it could be anyone’s game and hopefully have more people in the running, making the whole thing a nail biter up until the bitter end… and with a healthy prize of $500 (or the entry fee of a WSOP circuit even satellite).
Of course, to keep players interested in the series throughout the whole 23 weeks, I wanted to keep very exact and weekly statistics of all that was happening. I looked at numerous online solutions to make these stats available. Some good and some horrible. The one I decided to go with in the end is diypokertour.com.
First off, it’s free. A big factor in my decision making process, cause I’m not making any money off running a poker league… I don’t take a rake. Second, it’s easy to work with. Not only can I figure out my own point system. I’m able to easily go login and update statistics. I can easily add players, add games, even send emails to all the players involved. DIY Poker keeps track of the regular number of wins, cash won, number of games played… but also the weighted average finish (perhaps I use that as a scoring system next series). Third, their support is great. I had a few questions and they were very quick to respond.
Some of things that I’d love to see (which they were very receptive to hearing), the ability to add your own logo to the leaderboard. The ability to add the leaderboard to your own website (like this one). But overall, I have to say I’m very happy with dyipoker.com in regards to league management.
Last night, I decide to finally combine my two passions of poker and film making. I’ve been wanting to do something like this for awhile and I just happen to have a good buddy of mine who is a top-notch Assistant Camera staying at my house while he works on a feature shooting in town. He had the day off so I recruited him to run camera for me.
So here it is, Part One of a (hopefully) multi-part video series from Poker Penguin on how to play No-Limit Texas Hold’em. This first part covers the basic rules of No-Limit Texas Hold’em (in a hopefully entertaining format).
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which is a nearly hand by hand description of his march to victory at the 2007 Aussie Millions. He lets the reader inside of his head. From his brilliant bets to his embarrassing blunders.
