MTT Poker Player

I am a Professional Poker Player and Coach from England.

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Friday 25 November 2011

One Hand At A Time

I wanna talk a little about variance and not letting it effect your game. Firstly I'm gonna talk a little about cold decking.

The last 100 SNG's that i have played have been very frustrating and i will tell you why. Most people see variance as having the best hand and it being outdrawn and although i do define this as variance i don't see it as the most frustrating form. To me cold decking is probably worse. This week i have encountered many situations where i know my ranges are very close to perfect but time after time i am running into hands a lot more than i should whilst stealing or catching someone at the top end of there range and just seeing tourney after tourney disappear into the minus column. Now why is this more frustrating? Because you cant see directly that you was ahead and got unlucky the only way you know whether you was unlucky in that situation is if you know the likely outcome of that hand over infinity and how far away the current hand is from that. Another frustrating part of variance like this is it wont be shown in your Holdem Manager or Poker Tracker EV adjusted figures.

As shown here:

I find as I'm sure some of you do as well that if you have a bad poker day, week or month sometimes it makes you feel better to bring HM or PT up and have a look at Ev adjusted winnings so that you can feel good about yourself. Now take a look at the graph above and find the good! Cold decking is sneaky :)

All this ranting brings me on to my main point ” Playing one hand at a time”

As a poker player you can only control what you do, not what cards are dealt to each player and what cards will come in future or throughout the current hand. So each hand is played on its merit. How is the most profitable way to play this hand? This is answered by past history with the player, hud stats, position, pot size, relative stack size etc. All of this information isn’t effected by any uncontrollable natures of poker and as such you shouldnt change the way you are gonna play a hand just beacause you have been effected by the random elements within the game of poker recently.

I will give two examples of this (SNG):

Last 6 of a SNG: Lag SB(Reg)- stealing sb 80% he opens for standard 2.5bb and you have 10bb holding KTo. Now this is a shove 100%. Now get inside the mind of a player who lost his last 6 coin flips, 3 of his 80% hands and has ran into a hand in the last 3 of 4 SNG's, this can effect his thinking and make him lay this down here.

Same as above but now 4 handed you hold 87s. SB stack is 1400 and you have 2000, blinds 100/200 everyone covers you both. Now this is a fold. But get inside the mind of a player who has cashed his last 10 SNG's and has had 4 1St's in that run. If he is running good he may think a shove is EV+ here when its not.

The Key here is never be results orientated.

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