Darkened Poker

Was checking out Google Books and found they had digitized a copy of this classic gambling book from 1864.  This book is responsible for spreading the game of Whist throughout the states.  Shortly afterward Whist evolved into the draw poker games still played today.

I applaud googles amazing effort to make the 90% of books that are out of print available to people online.  Not only is it a great feat but they did it knowing full well it would result in lawsuits against them.

I like Brian Pages quote “If we wait for permission from all the publishers it will never get done, this has to be done”.  That is what happens when you put engineers in charge, things get done…

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Darkened Poker

It is clear I have a problem with this style other than the last 4,000 hands were I was just plain running bad.

Red line = win or loss before show down

Blue line = win or loss at show down

Green line = total win or loss

My hand reading is working and I am showing up at the river with the best hand like I should be.  But why in the hell is the red line such a major bite out of my profit.

That red line is way bigger than just lost blinds and failed c-bets.

It is either:

• Getting moved off to many winning hands before showdown.
• People are re-stealing too many pots against my bluffs.

It is interesting that the red line kind of flattened out when I was running really bad and kind of tightened up.  During that point I was just paying blinds and only pushing my good hands.  Kind of leads me to believe that my problem is most likely people are re-stealing pots to many pots against me when I am playing my normal game.

Will have to drop down to 1 or 2 tables and start taking detailed notes until I figure this out.  Too bad there is no software that can read your hand histories and give you stats on how often your bluffs failed.  Might just have to write that soon.

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Darkened Poker

Over the years I have read a few of Dr. Paul Ekman’s books on body language, some of it has been useful at the poker tables and work.  But I did not realize how bad I was at recognizing facial expressions until I ran across his web site and took the METT Demo.  I was unable to tell the different between angry and disgust or happy and frightened at the micro tells speeds.  It explains a lot of bad and expensive mis-reads in the past.

METT Demo

After running his software for awhile and I am picking up a lot more information than before.  I now see a lot of conflicting tells were people looked slightly happy on a flush making river card but had little micro flashes of sadness or disgust just before it.  This is brilliant software that will help shorten the years of trial and error learning micro tells into just weeks.  Best 20$ I have spent in a long time.

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Darkened Poker

Tom Dwan tries to outplay Phil Ivey and gets a slapped down.  Tom Dwan raises under the gun to 2.2k with 87 suited, Phil knows that he likes to raise light under the gun so he re-raises him to 9k with T8 offsuit.  Tom Dwan then thinks for a little while and then asks for a chip count from Phil Ivey before raises him back 29.6k.  Although this bet was just over 3x the amount Phil bet it was an odd bet.

Given that he just asked for a chip count and they were both about 250k behind the bet is not enough to serve as protection for a big pair. I think Phil picks up on this and re-raises again to 84k which is enough to get Dwan to lay down his hand. At that point Tom has no leverage to move all in with as Phil’s bet puts him on the edge of pot committed so he has to fold.

Right at the 3 min mark.

Short stacked, the 3 bet usually has all the leverage.
Deep stacked, the 4 bet usually has all the leverage.

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Darkened Poker

I was reading an interesting post called “The Evolution of a Poker Blog” at The Poker Mind and although it is true a lot of poker blogs evolve the way he describes this poker blog is quite a bit different since I did not start in the internet generation.

Stages this blog would have went through if it started from the beginning…

Stage 1:  Poker is great, how many home games and work games can I find to play in.  I am killing these little 10 – 20 buy in cash games and tournaments, what is next.

Stage 2:  Casino’s are great, there are places you can go to play poker at any time of the day and there is always a game running.  Min buy in is 100$ ( that’s a bit of money ) and wow some of these guys are good and just took $400 off me what the hell am I doing wrong.

Stage 3: Books are great, 200 books later I understand the evolution of poker up to this point, 5 different forms of poker and have a really good idea what everyone in the casino is doing.  Sucks that the casino is 80 miles away and I only get there twice a month.

Stage 4: Internet is great, I can play any time I want in my house coat for as low as 5 cents and up to 4000$ in any form of poker.  But dam all the tournaments start in east coast time so I have to stay up till 3 am to finish anything.  Oh shit you only have 30 seconds to make any decision, you never play with anyone for more than 5 min before they run off and where are now tells that I use to rely on in live games.

This is were I started blogging…

Stage 5: Stats and Max EV is great, wait I can break down every situation to a case of solving for max EV formula.  Once you have solved all the situations you can then look at the whole meta game as another EV formula.  Suddenly head up poker becomes really interesting as it is the quickest way to test all this theory out.

This is were I am still am now and I am not done…

I have not yet gone through each situation yet, determined all the best lines for each different type of opponent and the board or practiced it until it was second nature.  I am writing software to determine all the interesting stats and I need and some games to help really quickly train people on these concepts.   I will be posting the software on this site soon.

In the future…

I think stage 6 for me will be tournament poker but I am not sure at this point.  With the amount of money moving around in cash games these day you no longer have to play the big tournaments to get the big pay offs so we will see.

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Darkened Poker