Housekeeping
I’ve decided to go to a once a week publishing model. My main motivation here is so that when I don’t publish I only have to feel guilty one day a week instead of all seven.
I’ll try to do one big post every Monday. I’ll post more frequently for things that I feel that I must immediately comment on, a product review, or if I’m travelling and can only post infrequently.
Elements of Poker Delivers
I just started diving into Tommy Angelo’s Elements of Poker. I’m only a few chapters in so far but it seems to be classic Tommy. In other words, you have more to gain by upping your C game and playing less C games than you do by upping your A game.
A great example of this is Mike Matusow. When Mike plays his A game he’s one hell of a poker player. It could be argued that he’s one of the best players out there when his game is on. But when Mike plays his C game he plays so poorly that anybody who knows three of a kind beats two pair has a pretty good chance against him. Additionally, he tilts so easily that he plays his C game far more frequently than he should.
If Mike were able to better his C game so that it was only slightly worse than his A game and if he was able to better control how often he played his C game his results would improve dramatically. While improving his A game might make him a marginally better player when he’s on his A game, it would not improve his results anywhere near what he could gain by making improvements in his C game.
If you apply the same lesson to your own game think about how much better your results would be simply by improving your C game. Sometimes improving your C game could be as simple as knowing when to quit. Other times it will mean improving the delta between your A and C games. Decrease the delta and spend less time in C territory is likely to give most players a better return on their investment than improving their A game alone.
Poker Blog Post of the Week
And the winner is . . . . Ed Miller’s post on Selective Aggression. There’s a lot of truth in what he’s saying; especially for new players.
A lot of players who are trying to become more aggressive instinctively pick exactly the wrong situations to do so. They become aggressive when their opponents are being aggressive. They bet, get raised, and say to themselves, “I’m not going to let myself get run over again,” and reraise or push. Or their opponent bets, and they say, “I have a marginal hand that’d I’d usually just call with, but I’m going to raise with it this time to be aggressive.”
When I think back to the kinds that games where I used to get in the most trouble in my early days, they were always those types of games where I was getting bullied around and I figured the best way to combat a bully was to out-raise them. Of course, I kept running into monster hands and losing so I had to rethink that one. :-)
Ed goes on to say:
Here’s my rule of thumb. Aggression has the most value in poker when your opponents are checking.
Selective aggression isn’t about always throwing in the last raise. It’s about knowing when your bets are most likely to produce desired results.
Overall, a very insightful post dealing with a problem that many newer players struggle with at some point or another.
Poker Pic of the Week
Really interesting shot. Very good photography here.
Photo by Soren Dam.
Top Poker Stories
Betfair had a bit of a software glitch and found itself paying out all positions in SnG’s. Those lucky enough to get their money off the site before Betfair became the wiser are now being asked to give it back. Uh, this should go well.
Poker players are waving a juicy steak in front of the money-hungry US Congress. US Rep Jim McDermott is estimating that online gaming revenue could generate $42 billion in taxes for the US government. (registration required) Bad Congress. No tax revenue for you!
Meanwhile, Sweden is going after deadbeat poker players and affiliates who have failed to report their poker revenues. The Swedish gov hopes to rake in a nice little 44 million Euros (registration required)
And while we’re on the subject of government taxation of online gaming, Scotland wants to impose a gambling additiction tax. I actually wouldn’t be against the idea if it were properly handled and the money actually went to treat people with gambling problems.
Life on the Rock
Every time I exchange emails with people they inevitably ask how life is on The Rock. This is where I relate whatever random thought about my life here I deem appropriate.
They’re building a new housing/entertainment complex in the marina near my apartment. When all is said and done they plan on having a brand new casino, a couple hundred apartment units, and a mini-shopping complex.
Completion dates in Gib are always taken with a grain of salt. Another housing development, Atlantic Suites, was nearly a year overdue when I first arrived almost a year and a half ago and it is still yet to open.
One advantage the Gib real estate market enjoys over neighbouring Spain is that they’ve already reached the limits of land capacity. New building initiatives typically involve bringing in earth and pushing out the sea. That’s exactly what they’ve done for the new housing/entertainment complex. Large portions of it are on top of what used to be water.
Because of the lack of physical space to build the price of homes can reach staggering levels. The new housing/entertainment unit has people looking to get £1500 – £1700 for a 1 bedroom apartment. For my American friends, that’s close to $3000 – $3400.
But one upside is that you tend to save a lot of money over living in a big city. I don’t own a car so I don’t have any auto related expenses other than when I decide to rent a car and travel around Spain. Most of the shops on Main St are overpriced and aimed at cruise ship tourists so I don’t do a lot of random shopping or make many impulse buys of electronics or computer equipment.
Most importantly, you never really feel settled in. Not being a citizen of an EU country I don’t have a right to live here and I have to apply for a permit. That means that in the back of my mind I always try to remember that I’ll likely have to sell or give away most anything I acquire here as shipping it back overseas would be prohibitively costly save for specific items that I would not want to have to replace.
So as a result, despite astronomical costs of living, I’m actually saving more than I used to back in the US. Things aren’t that bad after all.
Parting Shot
Well, that’s it for this week. I’m 1 for 1 on this new posting schedule. We’ll see if I can’t deliver a perfect season :-)
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Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.
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