Improving As a Player

Hey guys! This is a cross post I made from FoursFull and thought I would share it!


Poker is like a hot air balloon in a sense that if there is a big hole in the balloon we have several options. We can do nothing about it and gradually come back down to the ground (most likely breaking our face). Or we can work on it slowly and attempt to patch it up, eventually fixing the hole and lifting up higher. 

If you are unable to put the above together it’s pretty simple. By making no effort to fix our leaks and study, we are constantly playing poker with holes in our game which does not sound like a lot of fun. However, if we dedicate ourselves to improving as a player, we are able to patch the hole up one step at a time and work on becoming a successful poker player.

Always focus on improving as a player and make that your main goal whenever you discuss any form of poker. I find setting out a specific schedule on when you will study/review hands very satisfying and highly recommend it because it will sort of force you to work on it. For example, I normally play from 9:00am-11:00am, browse the forum and look at HH's after, then study whether its watching a video or reading a book after midnight. Obviously it will depend on your social life, but it can be easy to balance your life with poker. Various options are given to us for free that we need to take advantage of to get better and I will list these options and hope others can add on to more ideas:

1) ) Read x amounts of HH’s every day. A key concept is that you must work out the hand yourself by going through each street and assessing the opponent’s ranges. You don’t necessarily have to post but make sure to read what the better players have to say and compare that to your answers.

2) Read x amount of articles on poker sites such as from here FoursFull or on 2p2 and review and work on each new concepts each week.

3) Join a study group or contact people on skype who are constantly talking about poker. The more you talk about it, the more you will learn from it. If you want to join a group pm me and ill give you my skype.

4) Get a subscription at a poker training site and make it an effort to watch a video each night or every other night. Watching a video will open up your eyes to basic spots you thought were standard but weren't, or just opportunities that your missing by folding too much when there was a chance to steal the pot. 

Training sites:
DeucesCracked

5) Make it an effort to read a certain amount of books in a month whether its ranging from 1-5 books.

6) Analyze you hands through your HUD database and get out pokerstove (pokerstove) and put in ranges and see if your making mistakes or not. This will help you with hand reading since your always trying to assess what your opponent could have. 

I'm sure that there are tons of more options but these are the one's I can think of on the spot. Poker takes a lot of dedication (ask some of the really good players here and they will tell you) and it is extremely important to put in effort on improving. Otherwise, playing with a bunch of leaks likely won't end on a positive note.

Things are Looking Up

Yo guys! Firstly, school is terrible! My math professor is the worst of the history of math professors and I just totally bombed my exam :( but anyways I'll end the rant!

Poker wise things are going great and really hope it stays this way for a long time. I'm most likely taking a 10bi shot at 50nl when my bankroll hits 1.3k (its at 1.15k now so 6 more bis at 25nl) and going to pray to run decent so I can stay up there. I have only played 6k hands at 25nl FR since switching from 6m and must say that the games are much fishier! Starting out at 6m really has helped me in FR since at 6m your range of hands are weaker and allows you to play a lot more postflop while in FR ranges are tighter and decisions are decently easier. 

I'm going to try to get another update this week but also I think I might post a thread I made on Foursfull to try to maintain a good and thorough blog. Also updated the current graph!

The Beginning of the Rise

Hey guys what's up! My name is Tyler and this will be my first blog post which i'm super excited about! Hope to get 2-3 posts per week depending on my time. So to get things started, here are a couple things about myself. I live in California and currently go to a Junior College in Southern Cal with an undecided major but at the moment I am leaning towards something in Business Finance as the stock market really interests me. The main thing about myself is that I am 19 years old aspiring to be a poker player. My goals from playing poker are not to make a living from it, (that would be putting an extreme amount of stress on myself), but to create a decent income from it while improving at a fast rate.

I started off getting into poker while watching the WSOP on ESPN during the summer when I was 17 years old and got hooked on the game (I am not a gambling addict). I first joined a forum www.cardschat.com and owe a lot to them for making a semi-decent player! I posted on there for a year and met some really good people that I talk to daily on skype and owe a lot to them as well. I now am playing on the Merge Network Carbon Poker grinding 25nl FR 6-8 tables at a time and starting to post a frequent amount on here FoursFull. What I will be doing in this blog is posting anything poker related (what I studied, graphs, etc,) and other life related things. So I hope some of my followers enjoy and can wish me good luck!