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deadmoney314 · Posted: Fri Jan 05, 2007 2:11 am Post subject: Variant Styles... Grasshopper

Hero gets K Heart

9

in the hijack, my five opponents have shown trickiness and are usually aggressive, but play has seemed pretty passive the last couple orbits, oh damn now I've taken too long to raise, they are going to suspect something... pffft, I hate these borderline decisions. **** the button 3-bet, do I cap or just call, he is 35/25/2.

Sound familiar? Most of you that have played a decent amount of poker wonder sometimes if your opponents can see your hole cards because it seems to be the only explanation why some days you simply get pwned. Other days, you have your opponents off balance making every possible mistake against you. There doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason and somewhere in the back of your mind you hear a voice rumbling, "variance my child".

Variance rears its head in many forms and we are all its champion and its victim. After 100,000 hands of multi-tabling and you look at your PT stats and see your winrate breaking even or worse, in the red you start to think about what you can change to get ahead because you see that your style just isn't producing like you thought it would, and now you have some hard stats verifying this.

The first thing that comes to mind is hand selection. You look at your losers and winners and nothing seems to make sense, "how can I be winning a ton with QTs and losing big with QJs"? You may even think, well I'm going to tighten way up and that may do the trick, and end up eliminating too many hands for the sake of improving your winrate but it backfires and you lose even more because you've cut too deep.

In desparation you go from TA to TP which seems to do the trick... for a while, and your short run profits evaporate in the virtual felt. Nothing seems to work and you find yourself cringing while clicking "join waitlist". The drive to play is lost, the game is no longer fun and worse, your confidence is gone.

What happened? How could this all go wrong, even the beginners seem to pwn you and you have 100,000+ hands of experience.

I've hinted at this before with words like "imagination" and learning more than one style of play but it goes to the core of winning poker. When your game is predictable, no matter how solid, you go from hunter to hunted. This may not always mean a solid predictable style will lose money, but a predictable style will always have the user thinking, "it seems like I'm missing out on something" which is namely a higher win rate--be it from -0.5bb/100 to 0.5bb/100, or 1 to 2.5

Here are some quick ways to develop a multi-style attack. First of all, if you always play 24/17/x, try a day of 20/13/x and another day of 30/15/x and even 42/18/x. A lot of times you will even win while experimenting because all of the opponents who know you pretty well (especially those with HUDs) will be placing you on entirely different hands which more often than not will get them to commit mistakes--not re-raising when they should or raising when they shoudln't.

This alone will not become a substitute for a single solid style but it gets experience under your belt to know what hand selections do well against the many different combinations of opponents you can have in a myraid of positions around you. You might even find that a certain hand selection will work better with the same players if those players are in a different position relative to you at another table.

Of course this only covers hand selection but the same ideals can be applied to post-flop play as well. If your post flop play is normally hyper-aggressive, try playing some sessions passive or vice versa. The effect on perceptive opponents will usually be profitable. In essense, when they are expecting "A", give them "B". I can think of no better way to get in tune with your table image than experiencing these results from deviating from your normal play. And this is the one get out of jail free card you can play so that you can abuse FPS (fancy play syndrome) so long as you are doing it to work on your overall game.

Players call this "mixing it up" or "changing gears" but instruction manuals are scarce on getting from point A to B. Hopefully this gets you thinking about the how and why of breaking free of a predictable betting pattern.

Good luck!

fire_eyes_2k · Posted: Fri Jan 05, 2007 2:18 am Post subject:

Thats a better read than some of the tips from the pros deadmoney, nice post.

I hope you've submitted that to the blog

deadmoney314 · Posted: Fri Jan 05, 2007 1:10 pm Post subject:

Thx and this one stays here, I'm not really a blogger (not that there is anything wrong with the blog).

honkythunder · Posted: Fri Jan 05, 2007 6:13 pm Post subject:

Really a sweet post.

So I can understand it better, what do these numbers you used mean?

First of all, if you always play 24/17/x, try a day of 20/13/x and another day of 30/15/x and even 42/18/x.

fire_eyes_2k · Posted: Fri Jan 05, 2007 6:36 pm Post subject:

deadmoney314 · Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 1:20 pm Post subject:

I thought this was an excellent article to link to this thread:

http://www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/current/Rus0207.html

tenn_tim · Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 2:00 pm Post subject:

Very well written, A lot better then some of the pro articles I have read.

This hit right on the mark also, "Players call this "mixing it up" or "changing gears" or I have always just thought of it as changing my game. I dont have a lot of experence online, less then a year, but many years of playing I learned you have to, the pros have to also.

If you play the same people, as in my case, some people I have been playing with for over 25 years. You get to know them well, you really can read them. If you dont learn to change or mixup you game, your fish bait.

I have watch the pros do this, but I can see why, they know each other pretty well, in a lot of cases their neighbors, they play golf together in the day, and have played each other for so many years, and know each other well enough that that they have to do it also.

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