Sharing Is a Good Thing

• Would you be allowed to discuss your hand with a friend in a live game?
• Absolutely not!
• So therefore you shouldn’t be doing it in an online game?
• Why not?
• Would you be allowed to sit there with a calculator adding up the chips in the pot or pulling out printed stat charts in a live game?
• Absolutely not!
• So therefore you shouldn’t be doing it in an online game?
• Get outta here!

Live land based poker and online poker are two very different beasts!

Every time the poker site throws up the pot figures, you are using the poker site’s calculator! People are encouraged to use stat charts provided by the very poker sites they are playing on.

Poker sites carry articles by pro players informing you to do things like use post-it-notes around your pc with tips written upon them, to use four colour decks, make notes on players by using the online poker sites scratch pads, that are there in your face next time you meet a ‘noted’ player!

Can you imagine leaning across a table and slapping a post-it-note on a competitors forehead that read “maniac” and hoping it would still be there next time you met?

I could keep on making examples of the differences between live and online poker, but, the main point here is, is that there are differences! It is impossible to try to equate the two formats, of live poker with online poker.

How many people are in online games with their friends or spouses looking over their shoulder? You think there is silence in the room when that happens? Chatting with friends whilst playing online is no more cheating than referring to stat charts, or letting the poker site computer tally up the pot for you.

At the end of the day it is a personal call, but I can see no difference between a couple of friends sitting here chugging beers with me and talking about the online game I am playing and sitting online and chatting to a couple of friends on Skype whilst playing an online game.

So now that the idea of sharing thoughts on a live game might be considered cheating has been nicely tucked up in bed and put to sleep. We can move on.

Personally I think this is one of the most effective ways of bringing your game on a notch or two. It certainly helped me make some positive steps.

Playing poker online is a solitary occupation for the most part, sure you may be in a league and have online poker buddies with whom you chat about the game. You may have read books and articles, you know your stats and odds, you have chatted with your poker peers and agreed on plays and moves and all that kind of thing.

But for all that, once a game starts.. you are on your own.

The bell goes and you step into the ring, your head is full of all the training moves, you know exactly how to fight this fight! So you feint a right cross to the jaw, just like in training and the guy opposite you stumbles and catches you with a sucker punch to the kahoonah’s .. and there goes a large chunk of your stack. And more often than not a little piece of your confidence goes with it.

As the game progresses, little anxieties can creep in and now and then you may drift away from playing with your head and start playing from your gut. It happens to all of us, we go on tilt, we get distracted, we lose perspective and focus and that is where playing with friends really comes into it’s own.

When you have poker buds looking in from outside the game, more often than not they’ll call your original thought/play and that voiced reassurance will make you play your original call and not back off. Conversely when you are about to chance your arm on a hand which you really shouldn’t be in, you can get reigned back in by the common sense of the players sitting outside the game.

Your friends sitting outside of the game quite often will have a better take on some of your plays, simply because they are not as emotionally involved in the hand/game. That detachment allows the advice you receive to have a very positive and sobering effect.. It makes you re-think your play, something which is hard to do when you’ve been sitting for two hours battling away in an MTT on your own.

Lastly one weird thing I have noticed and others have also mentioned it to me, is that after you have played regularly with a group of friends yabbering away at you during games, is when you do go play alone you can still hear their voices in your head. It’s true don’t laugh!

If I play a game alone and I am thinking of making an ‘iffy’ move, quite often in the dark murky reaches of my head I can somehow re-hear Dog’s, or someone else’s scream of derision echoing back to me again…“no way Blag..look at his position etc.”.

Honestly folks try the ‘take a friend along” idea, you’ll be pleasantly surprised how much more this gives to your game and learning experience.

Anyone from my league that would like me to sit with them through a game have only to contact me and I’ll try my best to be there. Not that I am any poker mogul, but let’s share what we have with each other and we can all improve, can yah feel the luv?

There is a lot more I wish to write about today but I promised to reign myself in a bit when writing the blog, as there is the real danger of turning the blog into novelettes and I know you all will be starting to scratch the lint out of your keyboards with boredom if I go on to much.

Very quickly then, the other stuff!

The MTT strategy experiment is still ongoing and there are some very interesting developments starting to surface. I’ll keep things under wraps until the end of the month, so we have the full picture to examine rather than a half finished jig-saw puzzle.

Friday the 19th was a very good day for me. Took a 1st and a 2nd in two MTT’s, took a nice wedge down in a couple of cash table sessions and to top it all off I won the league game at the end of the evening.

Erk! Ok I know said “very quickly then” but, I feel I have to explain my reasoning to those players that were in the league game last night and especially those on the final table.

The league game was rather erm.. let’s say different. Typically it was a tight solid game played by the vast majority of the players. I was on a bit of a roll from my earlier games during the day and went into the league game confident. Played some good strong aggressive tight poker and slowly chipped my way up the leader board. This continued to the final table.

I sat around 1st and 2nd place as the game progressed into the 2nd hour, then the cards went ice cold on me, nothing not the smallest carrot came my way for almost 40 minutes. Because of the incredibly tight nature of the league games, no one in this time actually made any headway on my stack. There was maybe a couple of reasonable pots in this time but the money was just moving around the table for the most part.

Eventually we moved into the 3rd hour and we still had 6 players remaining and the game was turning into the usual plod of folding to any bet or the blinds. I had just had a very long poker day and was aching to go to bed, so big stacked I really opened up my game.

I got caught raising 4x the BB with a suited A-10 was called by a K-5 off (guess he was getting bored with it also?) who hit the K and halved my stack. Now the table was pretty evenly stacked and I had visions of another 30 minutes of grinding away. No way! I went maniac and raised and pushed like a… well like a maniac, either I was taking this down or I was going to bed.

So, I took it down, sort of…

Actually I only played maybe 3 what I would deem ‘out there’ calls and managed to hit the hands. Those 3 ‘out there‘ calls will be the only moves remembered by everyone, any good poker I had played during the evening will have been forgotten the moment I went all-in with the 9-2 off. Once I got into chip leader again I just played very aggressive big stack poker. Ending heads up with exactly the same player as last week in this game, Sue.

Who incidentally, had mentioned to me early in the evening that maybe she and I would end heads up again. Well her premonition was spot on and when we got to heads up I really fancied Sue to walk away with it. The heads didn’t last too long, the money switched sides a couple of times before I tripped with a pocket pair and that was that.

I did feel a bit guilty about winning the game as I had basically shut my eyes a couple of times towards the end and just hit the all-in button.. See yah next week Sue, same time same place….. same result!

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Finally I’d just like to leave a mention for my friend Dog.

All our thoughts are with you at this sad time Dog, words are about all we can offer you online, but be assured we are with you in spirit as much as is possible.

Take care bud.

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