Me and my brother had quite a fun night tonight; there wasn’t much going on in terms of people going to bars or parties, so we decided to grab a nice bottle of gin (unfortunately beefeater) and play some NHL 2K6 on the ol’ playstation 2 instead. A few hours later, I’m still not asleep and so I decided to just look around online for a while, and I stumbled across one of those poker sites where they sell some lesser-known pro’s instructional videos.

To be honest, the video was pretty mediocre; the narrator “umm”ed and “uhhhh”ed way too often, and his microphone was both too far and too close at times, but aside from that his actual commentary as well as his play were great. All it was was some mid-20s guy who was obviously a great cash player sitting down at a $400 NL 6-max game on Ultimate Bet, and he was just commentating on his own play as he went. There’s something about watching someone dominate a table at stakes you’ve only struggled at; watching him deal with the players at his table and suck in about 3 buyins in a half-hour was quite inspiring. Sure, he ran really well, but he also played well too. Twice he trapped a tilting opponent; once with a set of sevens, and the second time with top pair weak kicker. The way he trapped his opponents and basically let them hang themselves was damn near surgical.

I wish I could remember who’s mouth I heard it from, but a well-experienced poker player who, when asked a typical “What advice would you give to any up-and-coming amateurs who want to play pro?” question, responded by saying “Study the game, practice discipline, play once in a while and watch the pros lots”. That wasn’t directly quoted, but it was something along the lines of it. Anyways the real point I want to emphasize, which was the one that really stuck with me was that he encouraged playing just a little, and observing lots.

After watching that video and thinking back to that quote, I guess I’ve had what you could call a mini-epiphany. It’s just like, say, with boxing; you could practice your punches for weeks on a heavy bag and not progress one bit if you’re not clenching your fist properly or not keeping your wrist in the proper position. It could even hurt you and your progress by doing so. But if you were to watch a more experienced boxer have a session on the bag, you might see how to do those things properly, and you could improve X times faster than you would have had you not watched the pro go at it. It’s useless practicing something that you don’t even know how to do properly.

Now it would be going a little far to be saying that I don’t know the first thing about poker (I should hope so after playing nearly 3 years), but obviously there’s always room to improve. I mean my results haven’t exactly been consistent up to this point. I remember watching a sample video from another similar site to this one that dealt with inducing a bluff, and I’ve used that tactic from the video ever since. I’ve also loved talking to players like Tenbob on msn while he plays a MTT and lets me know what hands he’s picking up; it’s just great to get inside these experienced players’ heads and hear their comments and thought processes for big hands. I just might sign myself up for one of these video subscriptions; the site I found that video on was a little too expensive for me, but I’ll shop around.

As for my poker progress, I’ve for whatever reason started gravitating back towards Full Tilt rather than Stars, and it’s done me well so far. I played in a bunch of turbo SnGs on Stars, cashed in very few then won a $6 18-seater. I’ve also won 3 of 4 $8.70 qualifier SnGs on FT since my last post, and decided to play a 9K MTT in which I placed in a deep but disappointing 21st place out of about 550 entrants. So in total, the bankroll is up to $943.19 inluding $78 in $26 tourney tickets, but I’ve got to take a good chunk of that out for past dues that need to be paid.