Hi Vanessa,
Its such a privilege for the community here to be able to ask a truly world class player such as yourself questions in such an open format; allow me to heap a little more thanks/praise onto the already high amount collecting within the thread....
1) You seem to have shifted earlier in your career from a predominantly cash pro to an MTTer/live MTTer with great aplomb.....your unique talents seem perhaps better suited for crushing large buy in MTTs than sitting around bumb hunting and grinding fractions of BB's against other NLH pros...can you discuss the concept of value with regards to the two dominant forms of poker right now....those being MTTs and 6 max NLH ring games....with attention to where newcomers or beginning players might be best served devoting their energies assuming they are playing to be profitable eventually.
Thanks for the heaps of praise, I never stop appreciating it
As far as the age-old cash vs. MTT question... I'm a firm believer in the idea that you should learn cash before you learn MTTs. A lot of MTT players that are great at online are not that good live because they just don't have the deep-stacked experience which is vital to the big buy-in MTTs. All of the world class MTT players that I know are excellent cash players as well, and most of them started in cash where they learned to play really creatively with deep stacks.
2) As a sometime aspiring mixed games player I find it quite frustrating that right now it is impossible for me to hone Badugi variant and many limit draw game variants skills given the present situation in the US. I know for folks out west live play can/is an option, but the only regular mix remotely close to me currently is a 40-80 HORSE outside of Chicago that maybe runs 2x a week and offers no draw games per Illinois gaming rules/.
Do you have any advice, books, training videos that stand out as being especially indispensable to someone such as myself trying to not lose too much ground in the mean time....
Do you think it is wise of me to even still think of myself as someone who will play mixed games at some point??
This is just a really tough question, and I wish I had a better answer for you. I've been trying to play mixed online as much as possible when I leave the country - but if you're stationed in the US, I guess books and videos would be the best approach. I didn't really use those so I don't have recommendations for you, unfortunately.
3) I took an Lsat cold at my father's behest about 9.5 yrs back and busted a 171. This wasn't that surprising because I aced the verbal portion of the SAT as a 15/16 yr old and had always excelled at standardized testing. Im 30 years old and retraining/working part time right now bc the recession hit my livelihood especially hard, but several important people in my life nag me about possibly attending Law School. Im not crazy about the idea, but on top of the Lsat score I have a very strong connection to Penn and probably could get admitted there.
What are the top 4 things to consider for someone like me who is fortunate enough to have a fairly clear path to a top 15 Law School?
I think the main thing to consider is whether you actually want a legal career or not, and what you want to do when you leave. So many people go into law school thinking they will figure it out when they get there, but the career services people aren't that great at helping with that. They're great at providing opportunities for those who know what they want, but that's a different animal. So a lot of people end up in law school and leave more lost than when they came, or they figure out they didn't really want to practice law in the first place and waste 3 years and $150k for a cool degree.
I was different as I knew very clearly what I wanted to do, but figured out I'd rather do poker. Still though I took a lot of courses focused specifically on the practice of civil rights and human rights litigation and made the most out of the resources there, so now I feel very prepared if I ever want to go that route.
