When I was around 12 I started playing ice-hockey in my towns hockey team, that lasted for about 4 years. Even when I wasn’t part of a team me and my friends used to get together and play on our neighbour hood football field which was covered with ice during the winters.
I have always been in pretty good shape and have gotten used to the benefits of exercise. There have always been periods of severe inactivity
But I always come back to some form of exercise and each time I “start again” I am stunned of the benefits and how it makes me feel.
What benefits have I noticed? Everyone is different so you might not have the same things, I hope my benefits encourage you to try it out, if you are not already doing it.
1. Emotional Balance
I have always been a person with lots of energy, hyper-active at times And when I have so much excessive energy and when something goes wrong, it all turns to frustration and the feeling is pretty overwhelming because it can lead to blaming myself for weird things.
When I started exercising my emotions slowly started becoming more balanced, because of a more healthy diet and exercising. There are some days when I feel a very weird energy build-up and it feels like I just have to do something.
When I exercise this feeling becomes neutralized, it gives me a way to get rid of that excess energy. This means I have more emotional control at the poker table.
2. Stamina
I am slowly building my endurance, both physically and mentally. I can focus longer and think about situations with more clarity. I shouldn’t say that I can play longer poker sessions because that might be misleading.
I don’t recommend playing long sessions (more than 60 minutes at a time) because after a certain amount of time your ability to focus plummets.
What I can say is that my ability to focus while playing poker has become longer since I started exercising.
3. Discipline
When you do something regularly you will naturally run into days where you just don’t feel like doing it. This is how you build discipline, by doing things that you do not always want to do.
And I am not saying that you should do something you hate, if you hate exercising all you have to do is re-frame it. Ask yourself why you hate exercising?
Is it because it is laborious? Are you focusing on the tiresome aspects of exercising? I will bet you that this is the case if you think exercising sucks.
What would happen if you thought about how good you would feel, how you would look and how this might improve your whole life? Wouldn’t you feel a bit better focusing on that instead?
So when you feel like just watching some TV and eating a cookie or two, think about how good you would feel after your workout and how GOOD you would feel after a year of working out regularly and then get off your ass and exercise! That is discipline.
The more I exercise the bigger my discipline muscle gets, I can get myself to play poker on a consistent basis even when I do not feel like it. Sometimes though, you have to realize when it is time to take longer breaks from poker to avoid burn-out.
4. Self-Confidence
My self-confidence always goes up when I’ve been exercising a while. Partly because my body is in shape and because I am in shape mentally. So many psychological benefits come from working out regularly.
Self-confidence also helps me assess poker games better and helps me to gather the confidence in taking shots at higher stakes in a calculated manner.
These are the main four things I have experienced while exercising, all I can say is that I feel great and it works for me otherwise I would slowly go insane and tilt all my money away
I’ve been helping my brother learn No-limit hold’em the past couple weeks, and he recently made the discovery that a little bit of planning goes a long way. We’ve talked about pot-control, inducing bluffs, and other somewhat complicated concepts. He summarized it in a much simpler, more effective way.
He told me that when the flop comes down, he looks at the board, and at his cards, and asks himself “How big a pot do I want with this hand?” Once he has the answer, the actual play of the hand is easier.
A couple example hands:
Hand 1, a small pot hand:
.50/1.00 NL, $100 effective stacks.
Hero raises As2s to $3 on the button. The BB, a somewhat loose but not terrible player, calls.
The flop is: Ad 4h 4s (pot: $6.50)
How big a pot do we want with this hand? Not a very big one. If we get the remaining $97 into this $6 pot we will undoubtably lose.
There are no draws, so our opponent will rarely have a worse calling hand, and any Ace or better is ahead of us. With that in mind, we would want to get one, perhaps two streets of small betting in at the most to get value from pocket pairs.
If we decide to bet the flop and get raised, a possibly tough decision (is he bluffing? does he really have a 4?) becomes simpler: The pot is getting bigger than is acceptable for our hand’s strength, so we fold.
If bet-folding is uncomfortable, perhaps we check the flop, and our opponent makes a midsized turn bet. We call, intending to call a midsized river bet – hopefully we have induced a bluff.
Things have gotten much simpler now that we know how big we want the pot to be. If our opponent tries to force the pot larger than we are happy with, we simply fold and save some $.
Hand 2, getting value:
.50/1.00 NL, hero has $100 and villain has $25
Folded to hero on the cutoff whe raises to $3 with JhJd. The villain on the button, an unknown shortstack, calls.
Flop: Td 8d 7c (pot: $7.50)
Our opponent has $22 left in a $7.50 pot. With so little left to bet and so many draws out we are happy to get $22 in the pot.
So, we bet full pot ($7.50) so our opponent gets as close to allin as possible before the board can scare him or us. Villain minraises to $15, we stick to the plan and shove, and he calls. (pot: $51.50)
Villain shows Jc8c for middle pair and a gutshot. The turn is a K and the river an A – our Jacks hold up, but the turn and river would have made it very difficult to get villain’s whole stack had we played it slower. Or worse, if we tried to induce bluffs we might have ended up getting pushed off the best hand!
Planning is a powerful tool in NL. Take a look at the flop, and the board before you take an action. Ask yourself “how big of a pot do I want?” With a little practice even tough decisions can become much easier.
I know you guys have been requesting a tutorial on how to shuffle poker chips, and today I just happened to stumble upon this fine video (with nice music to boot) on shuffling them chips. Enjoy.
I put in a marathon session today of 4,000 hands, in that session I was at 2-tables with a fairly good player who was probably running good and re-raising me with a pretty wide range. This gave me the idea for this post and how you can shift your thinking and learn how to play re-raised pots better.
I know it is frustrating to constantly get re-raised, but you have a few options:
Leave the table (which is always easy online)
Assess the situation and determine if this guy is bad and exploitable
For most players leaving the table is easiest and best, although it might bruise your ego, it will save you lots of chips in the long run. If you decide to stay, how do you handle a situation like this?
1. Step Back and Assess
The most common response to getting re-raised in poker is to get pissed at your opponent and over-adjust. When you do this you’re playing into his strategy. You have to carefully assess what his range might be and I determine this by the frequency of his re-raises.
If he is doing it too often (you will get a feel for this the more you play) you can start adding more hands to your pre-flop calling range. Let us say your normal range for calling re-raises pre-flop is Aces, Kings and Ace King for simplicity, and this guy re-raises you three times and you fold because you don’t have a hand enough to call.
And he keeps doing it in a short amount of time (i.e. high frequency), now you start suspecting he is doing it with less than premium hands, so you can start to think about what hands to add, maybe you’ll want to add Queens, Jacks and Ace Queen suited to your range. That is how you adapt properly, avoid calling away your money with hands like 9 8 which are dominated by his range.
2. Plan
Once you have PROPERLY observed that your opponent is getting a bit out of line with his re-raises it is time to plan. Like I said above, you can add some hands into your calling range. But you also have to determine how you are going to play them on different flops, and you have to think about how your opponent is playing when he misses and when he hits in re-raised pots.
The players who re-raise and continuation bet close to a 100% are easy to play against, you are getting a nice overlay because every time you call you know they will bet the flop and when you hit a favorable flop you can just go all-in (with 100BB stacks).
Say for example, you’ve decided that you are going to call with A Q if your opponent re-raises. You open in middle position and as expected you get re-raised by your friend on the button, you now decide to call.
The flop comes T 9 4, you check, your friend bets as we planned and you now check-raise all-in and if your adjustment was correct he will often fold here and even if he calls you usually have a ton of outs.
3. Execute
It is crucial to plan your hands in no-limit Texas Hold’em like we did with our A Q hand. When you observe your opponents tendencies and adjust properly it will be hard to make a mistake.
Once you’ve got your plan together you now have the last portion left in your puzzle and that is execution. This part should be easy once you’ve thought about how your opponent plays and planned how you will proceed, now all you have to do is wait for the right moment and do it.
Disclaimer: This article might be confusing to new players and might lead to money burning. If you are unsure of what I have just talked about leave a comment and tell me what exactly you’d want a better explanation on.
Big pots create big opportunities for profit and loss, that’s why you want to play the big pots better than your opposition. Keep your head cool and your rational thinking intact and you should be fine, start being emotion and you will end up losing those chips.
I played a short heads-up session today on Full Tilt while I was waiting for my cash-out from other poker rooms so I could deposit to a new one. This was the kind of player who is in with too many hands and playing them in a very unorthodox manner (a.k.a donkish).
He was min-reraising me pre-flop 80% of the time I raised from the button and he was min-raising from the button with a very wide range. I started off playing pretty tight like I always do heads-up, because I want to feel what I am up against and how I can adjust my play.
The game started off with me raising like normal to about 3BBs (3 big blinds) on the button a few times and I kept getting either called and bet into on the flop or min-reraised to 5BB total.
In the beginning of this brief heads-up match I missed all of the flops so I couldn’t do much and I was not going to start bluffing my chips away vs. a player like this who was most likely going to call me down with any piece of the board.
So I was patient. He suddenly showed off a new invention he apparently just came up with, called the min-check-raise, he did it way too often, which made me believe he didn’t have much, but again, I couldn’t do anything because I was not hitting flops.
My plan was to frustrate him by making big bets and raises when I had the goods and play tight pre-flop so I could play more aggressive post-flop, this would lead him to believe I was full of it even more.
I was losing, I was probably down a buy-in from missing flops. This is usually where most players get frustrated and try to start bluffing a player like this, but you have to remain patient and realize that you will get his money when you start hands and he gives you his money with worse hands.
Then came a hand where I got stacked, I raised Q T on the button and got min-reraised again, I called.
Flop came T 9 2, he checked, I bet pot and he min-check-raised me, I pushed all-in instantly and got called by
T 9 and his hand held up. Oh well, these things happen.
Why did I push the flop there? The simple answer; because I thought he would call with a worse hand, I am pretty sure he would’ve called off his stack there with any ten and hands like QJ which had a straight draw.
A few hands later I received Q 8 and I just limped on the button because he was min-reraising me and I didn’t want to build pots, because I knew that I could get him to commit all his chips even though the pot was small on the flop and if I made the pot big he was going to win it most of the time if I didn’t hit because he was betting and calling all the time.
So he raised in the big blind and I called with my Q 8, the flop came down 4 5 8 , he bet over pot (16BB into a 6BB pot) and I called, turn was the 5, he now bet pot and I pushed all-in and he folded. Why did I push all-in? My reason was the same as in the Q T hand, I thought he would absolutely call with worse hands and there was big likelyhood that he didn’t have anything, and he might even call with a draw.
This is when the momentum started to turn in my favor. I started getting pots and winning back my money and then some, this short heads-up match really summed up how you can to adjust and adapt to different players, especially heads-up, you can’t start forcing the action and if you feel like you’re being outplayed and don’t have a plan to get your opponents money in the long-run, there’s nothing wrong with just quitting.
Anyway, then came the following hand: I get T 9 and just limp on the button, he raises as always and I call.
Flop comes a beautiful T 9 4 , and he bets 5BB into the 6BB pot, I raise a bit over the pot to 25BB total, he pushes it in and I call. He shows A 6 with only Ace high and backdoor straight draw.
The turn brings a nice K and he is drawing dead. I got my money back and ended up almost 1 buy-in vs this guy.
So why did I say this heads-up Texas Hold’em match worked out nicely? Because it shows that you have to plan what to do and how to adjust to your opponent. Sometimes you’ll play vs. a player like this and he’ll keep sucking out on you, hitting better flops or just bluffing you out when you hit nothing.
During these times you have to decide for yourself if you want to use a stop-loss, and if you’re starting to become frustrated I recommend you quit, but if you do what I did and plan then you should be fine.
When I was around 12 I started playing ice-hockey in my towns hockey team, that lasted for about 4 years. Even when I wasn’t part of a team me and my friends used to get together and play on our neighbour hood football field which was covered with ice during the winters.
8
, you check, your friend bets as we planned and you now check-raise all-in and if your adjustment was correct he will often fold here and even if he calls you usually have a ton of outs.
on the button and got min-reraised again, I called.
, he checked, I bet pot and he min-check-raised me, I pushed all-in instantly and got called by
