There something that I feel I should add to the last post, for clarification, before I move on to Part II (sizing bets to avoid being bluffed).

It’s the idea behind “big hands, big pots” which may not be obvious to everyone. If I have AK and the flop is A-9-5 and there’s one other guy in the pot with me, why does his hand suddenly get much better if we go all-in? His cards can’t change, so how can the size of the pot change how likely I am to win? This is not a terribly difficult concept, but it’s important enough to warrant a separate explanation.

This blog hasn’t been strategy-oriented for quite awhile, which was a direct consequence of me realizing that there was a lot of better strategy content out there on the web than what I, a small stakes hangaround, could offer. However, there are a few things to be said about that, and they are

* my strategy views aren’t “bad.” I’m not Ed Miller, but I do occasionally think something through and can make pretty coherent arguments for them. Or so I’d like to think.
* I like to keep book on poker theory “discoveries” I make, as it helps me with my learning process, and
* perhaps people like occasionally getting tips and pointers from someone who plays at their own level.

ChuckTs - who I just noticed is approaching 9k posts, which is pretty sick - had done a very good job of explaining pot control in NL, and with examples.

Last year, I spent a lot of time on the road (or, rather, in the air) travelling mostly to Beijing. Most of these (business) trips, I went on my own and therefore spent some time in the hotel room playing online poker. Not having access to PokerTracker and my notes (as I didn’t have that on my work laptop) meant that I was playing “blind” versus my opponents. Since I was going to play blind anyway, I figured I might as well play a style of game that I didn’t usually engage in, so I started fiddling with NL cash games, and intended to write about what I perceived the differences to be. As I stopped travelling to Asia, the experiment “ran out in the sand” (do you have that expression in English? I’m sure you know what I mean, anyway) and this blog was left with just a few posts on the topic.

I play 6-max, and the play tends to be very loose, varying from extremely passive most of the time to maniacally aggressive the rest of the time. I do see tighter tables occasionally, but they’re a rarity and I like to avoid them. In a nutshell, I’m either hammering at pots with my big pairs and big connectors, or I’m getting in cheap with smaller pairs or smaller connectors to try and flop a monster and win a big pot. I’m learning to outplay certain opponent profiles with postflop play, but in general keeping it simple and sticking to a very straightforward TAG style nets a nice profit.

Well once again I apologize to all (or any, rather) of my readers for not updating my half of the blog for so long. Things in my personal life have been all over the place, and I haven’t had much to write about up until recently. Me and my would-be roommate ended up having a lot more trouble finding jobs than we’d originally thought, and obviously haven’t gotten an apartment yet with no income to pay the bills. We ended up getting some help at a youth employment center, and can hopefully have an apartment and a place by January, if not sooner. On top of all this, I ended up missing some classes in my college course and have been viciously trying to catch up with what I missed.

Mike Caro writes in his book about a phenomenon that doesn’t quite qualify as a “tell” but still gives a pretty reliable bit of meta-information about someone’s actions: When someone wins a big pot, he is - according to Caro - often too busy stacking chips to play the next hand unless it’s a monster.

Conclusion? If someone who just won a big pot decides to play (or raise) the next hand, watch out - it’s probably something you don’t want to tangle with. This is all good; but it doesn’t apply to online poker, since there’s no stacking of any chips going on.

Caro mentions somewhere in his book that someone who’s just won a big pot is busy stacking chips and therefore less likely to play the next hand. In other words, a big pot is enough to transform the loosest maniac into a rock, if only for a hand or two. I’ve noticed that the same holds true for online poker, where no chips are stacked. The only explanation, then, would be that the phenomenon is psychological. Someone who’s won a big hand perhaps wants to savor the feeling of being hugely ahead for a little while, and doesn’t want to risk that feeling by losing a big pot on the very next hand.

I wrote awhile back about differentation in poker. A few days later, I started a thread with what I consider a typical differentiation practise, and what I feel is the most important difference between the two situations I described. Aysak posted and asked me to explain what I meant with “overcounting outs” which is a good question, and something that I don’t think people consider enough when they make poker decisions. Today, I’ll try to explain it.

This post is going to be a bit weird, but bear with me.

From www.m-w.com :

Main Entry: dif·fer·en·ti·ate
Pronunciation: “dif-&-’ren(t)-shE-”At
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): -at·ed; -at·ing
transitive verb

And I’m especially using the meaning

2 : to mark or show a difference in : constitute a difference that distinguishes

Let me tell you why differentiation is important.

It is to find what separates one situation from the others. To find differences, or rather to specifically find what matters here. “How is A different from B?” or perhaps “What, in A, should I be focusing on?” To be able to think about the things that make a difference, like dismissing your own two cards and focusing on the overall strategy - like you would in the late stages of a tourney with a low M.