Darkened Poker

My biggest mistakes online has been note gathering on people.  The problem with taking notes on people online is if they play a lot they can get a lot better very quickly.  Notes that you made last week on someone can be invalid already.   And the only thing more costly than no information on someone is bad information on them.  So if the date stamp is no good, what is?

People tend to try and move as soon as they has stopped at least loosing money at a certain level.  So if you see them playing at a higher level, you know they have most likely stopped making the big mistakes they were at the last level.  Thus your notes are most likely not going to be any good.  Therefor the most important thing to record is the mistake they made and what the blinds were at that you saw them make the mistake.  If you see them at a higher level then you have to re-verify the lower noted mistakes before you can use it against them again.

Time does not really matter at all, I use to try and refresh notes I had made on some people if they were more than 6 months old.  Often it was a waste, some people do not ever change and their notes will be good forever.  Some people are paying attension and fix leaks in their game right away.  Same thing with SharkScope and other data mining sites, do not use any of the accumulated data as it a bad average.  Only take the data from the current stakes they are playing now.

I have a friend that I like to play live poker with, not just because he is a great guy to hang out with, but in general I always make more money with him around.  He is a big guy that cracks jokes and if he is not on tilt he can really lighten up the game.  When we play a pot together we joke about who is sucking out on who why the other is a donkey for not folding already, it tends to make it a fun event.  Often if we are heads up we will play a decent size pot with both of us showing down some crappy small pairs and laughing about who was bluffing more.

This is good for the game, people see us messing around and having fun they want to get in on the action.   But when other people are in in the hand we will not both be joking around as much, we will have the goods and have gotten way more action than we normally should have.  Thus we have the perfect way to extract more money from the table.  People think they are going to sneak in with their slightly good hands and stack us while we are fooling around.  We stack them.

It works almost every time.  Our craziness distracts them from really paying attention to what is going on and they let there guard down.  The really good players might not fall for it, but most everyone else seems to.  So counter to the popular belief that you should not go to the poker room and play a rake to just play with all your friends.  I think it is worth while to seat change and play with some of them.  Hanging with your friends keeps you off tilt, lightens up the mood and seems to extract more money from the rest of the table.

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Darkened Poker

For some reason in live games I see people give anyone with a lot of tattoo’s way to much action.  I can not begin to count how many people have pushed their entire stack to them while muttering about how they did not think they had anything.  It is common to stereotype people when you know nothing else about them.  And it might not always be wrong to assume that people with tattoo’s all the way down their arms are aggressive people in general.

But do not let this quick judgment overshadow hours of collected data.  For some reason people can not let this fact go more than most other stereotypes and will always assume he is just trying to be a bully and take the pot away.  After seeing a guy stack himself twice in this manner I asked him how many pots the guy had played and if he had ever shown down a loosing hand.  The guy knew the answer to them both, yet he ignored it twice in a row and still got cleaned out.  The visual reminder of staring at big tattoo’s is to strong for the logical brain to over come for some reason.

Most people have a very strong association of tattoo’s = bad choices, aggressive behavior and need to be taught a lesson.  So they try to play sheriff and ship them their chips again and again never seeming to clue in until it is way to late that they are not LAG’s.  I do not find stereotypes that great in poker in the first place, I do not like to play big pots with anyone until I have a lot of observed data on them.  Enough people are aware of table image and mix it up that stereotypes are often plain wrong.

But if I do run into a table full of people I do not know, I will often give them quick judgments but then spend a lot of time making sure I validate or reject them and not just forget about it.  Wrong data is way more expensive that no data.

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Darkened Poker

It is becoming quite common at some of the local clubs for whoever is under the gun to check in the dark no matter what.  Almost 50% of the time they raise blind and then decline their option to re-raise and then check in the dark.  Are these guys hidden poker geniuses?  Is there some advantage that I do not understand about the move?  Or are these guys just watching to much poker on TV and trying to hard be one of the cool kids.

After having spent some time thinking about all the situations in which it might be useful and I am not coming up with a lot.  But lets go through the factors that is your goal, what would make a difference on it.

Goal:

• Get a free card?
• Get a check raise?
• Throw off a excellent hand reader?
• Pure bluffs.

Factors:

• Blind Checking to different players types  LAGS vs TAGS.
• Blind Checking with certain hand types, small pocket pair, big pocket pairs, small connectors, big aces.
• Blind Checking to different #’s of players.
• Blind Checking to very good hand readers or not.
• Blind Checking after raising pre-flop or not

Goal of getting a free card.  There might be something to this but I would say a lot of conditions have to line up for this to work.  Say you have a very drawing hand that rarely flops and often needs to get to the turn before it becomes a good drawing hand.  ie small suited connectors that often flop 2 or more runner runner draws .  In this case against a mostly tight passive table I could see this sometimes working.  If you have an aggressive image some people might not bet their middle or bottom pair because they might fear a re-raise from you since you did not get to act yet.  They might check it one time and see what you do on the turn.  In the end I am not sure this is worth it as the amount of times you get a free card is not going to make up for the # of times you hit something that you would want to attack a tight passive table with.  And if you do hit something with a tight passive table, you will be giving them a free card to outdraw you as they almost always check.

Goal of getting a check raise.  Not likely to work with a tight table, might work with a very LAG table but then again just checking to a LAG table normally and someone will bet.  Plus you have to hit the flop or already have something big and hope it is not dangerous so that if someone does not bet that they do not get a free card.  Seems like for a check raise it is better to wait and see how dangerous the flop is before committing.

Throw off a expert hand reader.  Maybe, the only lines I can think of were it would help is with the small pairs, you blind check and if you hit a set and there is a big card out there then if someone bets and you re-raise they may put you on the big card rather than the set and give you more action if they have top pair top kicker or two pair.  This is pretty rare case and not worth worrying about.  Most readers will pick up on what your showing down pretty quickly so the confusion part will be short lived.  Other cases might be flopping a str8 flush draw, two pair or other hands that you would go to war with and there is an Ace or King out there that they can put you on.  But what your giving up for it is too much, I would wait for a safe flop before trying to play it tricky just for the good hand readers.

Make it easier to throw down a pure check raise bluff.  Yes this almost make sense, you called / raises under the gun you could have any pairs, big face cards,  maybe even some suited connectors.  If anyone bets the flop and you can go ahead and re-raise and they will think for a min that you might have it.  Now you can not do it to often before they realize you just picking of pots, but once in awhile it can work.  But to do that it means you have to do a lot of checking dark which means giving up control in other pots that you do not want to and calling under the gun with junk some times.  Plus if your bluff does not work that now means you play the rest of the hand out of position.  Does all this extra set up that you have to do to make them work outweigh the benefit you get from the successful bluff.  In my experience it does, the only time this bluff is any more effective than a normal check raise bluff is when the board has draws on it and you bet really big so they can believe you would have bet it if you had the chance to protect your hand.

Conclusion, I can see a little tiny bit of benefit to doing it with the small pocket pairs for deception value if they hit and there are big cards out there.  If you do give off a free card though be ready to not go broke with it and it is not the end of the world as you have a re-draw.  If you have a tight image you can try it and maybe pull off some re-steal bluffs against your weaker players, believe me your good players will catch onto what your doing really quickly and start coming back over the top.

Anyone got any other reasons to check dark, I would like to hear them, leave me comments.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

I was not in the best shape and pretty sure I did not have my A or even B game in me so I decided to skip the no limit and refresh my basics by playing a low stakes 3-6 limit Texas Hold’em at Casio Real in Manteca.  I was in for a treat, the game was in full on crazy mode with two guys capping every pot pre-flop, capping most flops and putting in at least one raise on turn no matter what.  I pulled in 17X the expected win rate in limit and was very upset when the game finally broke.  Some times you just get lucky and find a great low limit game were people are raising and building big pots which helps you overcome the large rake which can otherwise make it not profitable.

Here is the odd part, there was a lady there that was pissed about how the game was going, she was trying to call the floor man over and get him to stop these two gentlemen from raising.  My first thought being what is wrong with this women?    Then I remembered back a time when I all I wanted to do was go to a casino and play some cards.  If your only motivation is to have a little fun then it can get frustrating to fold all night, finally get a good hand not hit and be forced to fold some more just because two joker are messing around.  But if your there because you like beating games and winning money then this is the easiest target to exploit.

But this lady did not stop and think about how to beat the game, she let it get personal and decided to do everything wrong which got her busted so quickly it was comical to watch.

First she let herself go on tilt and instead of tightening up her game she decides to try and start playing every hand with them.  This is a recipe for disaster and she manages to blow through a buy in in about one round.  You can not take just any hand against two other random hands plus the choice hands of the whole rest of the table and come out a winner often enough to make money.  Although the rest of the table in general had loosened up a little bit there was people like me only coming in with good hand and taking down big pots which is a big drain on the random movement of money that loose players were pushing around.

She then decides on the next buy in that she will try to out raise them with some pretty bad hands.  Not sure where she was going with this approach, since they were capping all streets anyway all she did was get it there faster which meant less people in each pot.  The effect it had was create smaller pots were her and the two guys still all had really bad hands along with one other guy that had a really good hand.  So now if she did manage to win the pot there was less pay out for the same amount of her personal money she was putting it in.  This meant she went broke on that buy in even quicker.  If there had been only one crazy guy and her raises had and isolation effect that could get her heads up with a worst hand then it might have been a good idea.  But given that there was two raisers already capping every pot she had to know she was not going to get head up.

Next buy in she finally does something intelligent and asks for a table change.  If you can not beat the table then go to one you can.   For a moment I had hope for her but after one round she decides she can not wait any longer for the switch and seat changes from the right of the two raisers to right in between them.  If she was upset before when she was being faced with calling two bets twice in a row I am not sure why she thought being in the middle and having to call 1 bet four times in a row would make her feel any better.  Maybe she though her presents in between them would get them to slow down.  Whatever it was it did not work and she got the full seesaw effect and went even further on tilt.  She should have stayed on the right of them and took advantage of the knowledge gained the few times when it got through both them without a raise.

All she needed to do take advantage of this game was realize that since they were only capping pre-flop and on the flop with 3-4 players per hand she needed to limit her hand range to things that did not need a lot of implied odds.  Pairs and two big face cards only, suited connectors and other hands that need over 25 – 1 implied odds do not make sense in a limit game unless everyone was seeing the turn and river and it was still getting capped on those streets.  But if your putting in 12 pre-flop and only 3-4 are seeing the capped flop your not going to make your money back if your only going to get one bet called on the turn and they will fold to any bet on the river unless they hit.  Also she needed to play fit or fold poker on the flop, she was calling way to much with mid or bottom pair hoping to catch two pair when they were not going to pay her off on the turn and river.  Plus since there was others in the pot she may have already been drawing dead.

For some lady that had been in the marines she did not seem to be handling the pressure to well.  Hopefully for her she gets it under control, maybe reads some books by Roy Cooke about the professional mind set.  Other than the ugly words exchanged and the floor getting called over I did not mind her tilt as the two raises seem to feed off it and it only made the game play bigger.  But since she is a casual player it is nights like that, that will drive her away from the game for awhile which is bad for us…

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…