Blog - March 2007
Updates to PartTimePoker for March 25th, 2007
March 25th, 2007
Hey everyone -
This week on PTP we’ve got a new strategy article and a new poker tool review.
Our strategy article this week deals with the issue of compounding mistakes - the process by which one mistake results in a flood of mistakes. If that sounds a little too familiar to you, have a quick look at Strategies for avoiding cascading errors. Excerpt:
Poker players make mistakes for a variety of reasons – a lack of information, an off-kilter emotional state, a patch of temporary insanity, and so on. Each time you make a mistake, you probably spend some time immediately afterward playing detective in an attempt to uncover the root of the error. This type of reflection is critical, as it helps you identify flaws in your approach that can help reduce the amount and severity of future errors. However, the same reflective process that can help your game in the long term can do immeasurable damage to your game in the short term if you’re not careful. Focusing too much on a mistake you just made can increase your level of frustration, lower your confidence, kill your focus and undermine your image at the table, inviting a cascade of additional errors that often cause far more harm than the original blunder. This phenomenon is particularly damaging in tournament play, where you generally don’t have the luxury of taking a break to deal with an error away from the table.
So what’s a poker player to do? How can we best strike a balance between giving mistakes enough attention to ensure that we learn something from them, but not so much attention that they lower the quality of our play in the immediate future? The simplest answer is to develop a quick, rigid process for dealing with errors as they happen. As with any type of cognitive re-wiring, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, but I can offer a basic outline of the process that has worked for myself and other players that I know, and you can fine-tune it as you see fit to better suit your needs. My process involves four steps: Qualifying, Identifying, Remedying, and Closing…
The whole thing >>>
Also this week, PTP reviews the popular tournament results database Official Poker Rankings.com. Read our Official Poker Rankings Review here.
Have a good one
Team PTP
New content on Part Time Poker
Sunday, March 18th, 2007
Howdy
This week on PTP, a new article and two new reviews.
The article: another entry in our popular ‘quick tips’ series. This time, learn how to get more out of your poker books. Excerpt:
Poker books are a great investment that can pay serious dividends for your game. The great thing about books is how much they can do for your game if you’re just willing to put a in a little effort above and beyond a once-and-done skimming. Here’s a list of quick tips for increasing the return you get from your poker books:
1. Have a pen handy when you’re reading. Those margins on the pages of your book can - and should - be put to good use. Jot down whatever comes to mind as you’re reading - do you agree with the advice in a given chapter? Does something about a particular paragraph make absolute sense or little sense at all? Not only can these notes help you to really engage the material on your first read, but they also provide a handy reference point for you later on down the line to gauge how your game has developed over time.
Read the whole thing
Reviews: two this week - we have a Poker X Factor Review and a Super System review posted.
Updates to PartTimePoker for the week of March 12th
Sunday, March 11th, 2007
Hey everyone
New stuff on PTP this week:
First up, a review of Phil Gordon’s Little Blue Book. I found this book to be a solid followup to LGBook, altho I think LGBook is superior in a number of ways. Read that thought dressed up with more words and punctuation here.
Next, a review of the Universal Hand Replayer, a great hand replaying tool that looks to develop even further in the weeks and months ahead. If you’re not a poker x-factor member, this might be your best bet for a solid replayer that will allow you to study and improve your game.
Take it easy, see you next week
New articles on Part Time Poker
Sunday, March 4th, 2007
To kick off March, we’ve got a new software review and a new strategy article.
Software review: Idle Miner. Excerpt:
Any serious online poker player knows the value of analyzing hand histories. A lot of poker strategy can be learnt by studying your good and bad moves afterwards without time pressure. Of course, if you could study other players’ hand histories as well, you could learn even more.
And now you can. With the Idle Miner poker software from idleminer.com at your computer you can monitor tables at selected stakes and store their hand histories even if you’re not playing at the table. Idle Miner connects to the site and automatically reads hands from all active tables that match your settings and feeds them into Poker Tracker, the eminent poker statistics software.
Read it here…
Strategy article: Common sense tips to improve your live no limit cash game…
Sometimes the best thing you can do for your game is to make minor changes. Here are a few quick suggestions for quick tweaks you might consider making to your live no limit cash game.
1. Stop folding out of turn (or getting ready to fold out of turn). Making it obvious to everyone when you’re not interested in a hand also helps people to key in on when you actually are interested in a hand, and it can also be a signal of when you’re getting frustrated. It should also be a signal to you that you’re not paying enough attention to the action in front of you. I’m not saying you always have to wait until it’s your action to check your cards, but you should probably wait until it’s your action before you make a final decision.
2. Try declaring your raises verbally and then placing your call and your raise out separately (this is a legal move in 99% of card rooms - say raise. Making your raises in the fashion does a couple of good things. First, it helps you to get a very real sense of how large the pot is after your call, which can help you calculate your raise more precisely. Second, it forces you to take a pause in between deciding to raise and deciding how much to raise. Finally, it will often result in a few players behind you acting out of turn, (which is their own damn fault) affording you even more information about how large your raise should be.
Whole thing
Take it easy
