There Is No Limit Like No Limit Poker: May 2019

First you do it for Fun, Next you do it for Money, Then you do it for Love

With 2009 World Series of Poker Champion Joe Cada,
at age 21, made him the youngest champion ever.
Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood FL WPT 5/2020

I'm two thirds of the way finished with The Sex of Poker-- It's about how not to be a sucker to the unexpected and the unknown. It's The New Poker Lobotomy.

It's not so much about "counting your outs" and "folding AK in a raise, re-raised pot"-- that cause-effect relationship stuff like First in vigorish concept. Being the first player to bet, "creates" the edge of being the first to put your chips into the middle of a pot or

The Gap Concept --“you need a better hand to call a raise with than you would need to open the betting yourself.

It's more about the anti-poker game--situations. A collection of situations you haven't played yet; of the things you don't know. there is a massive collection of unknowledge,the anti-hands that contain all the hands that may still change your poker life.

The Sex Of Poker logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know. I considered that many of my Jackpots and big hands were caused and accelerated by their being unexpected.---of me being an anti-gambler. The upshot is that:Knowledge leads to action but lack of knowledge can also lead to action. At least, that was the case when I qualified for The Legends Of Poker on the WPT.

The Sex of Poker is really a game of mistakes and the greatest one is rooted in pleasure. The fine line we walk between success and self-destruction comes down to asking that one dirty (Harry) question rooted in the loner cop’s message of personal freedom, “Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?”

Poker is a game of situations. Winning poker is about making good decisions Feeling lucky and going to a casino is like feeling athletic and going to a sports bar. It’s a bad decision. It is the in to your sane, a kind of voluntary madness. The surest way of getting nothing from something. The road less traveled-the psycho path! To get an edge, you have to study the game, prepare and take,not just a focused approach but also a holistic approach that includes supplements, sleep, nutrition and exercise. A lot happens off the felt when you are not playing-doing the hard things now, so the easy things will come later.

What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure. Poker is no miraculous exeption. One in a million is not one in a thousand, yet we confuse them as we focus on the payoff. It's charged.

Black Swan Events Fooled by Randomness--"'We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness."

9/11 (Twin Towers) and Covid 19 are Black Swan Events... we retrofit a narrative to tell ourselves that someone should have seen it coming because we ourselves could not have been that stupid. And yet, we are no better prepared for the next one.We all know that history will be dominated by an improbable event, we just don't know what that event will be.

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So in Retrospect, when you were making your 5 year plan in 2015, hands up, who got this right?

A post shared by Ed Reif (@edreif) on May 20, 2020 at 12:31am PDT

Economically important things are consistently unexpected, in that people underestimate, on average, the probability and impact of improbable events We are chronic explainers-once an event happens we try our hardest to say I told you so and explain it...Hindsight and Monday morning Quarterbacking-Missing a train is only painful if you run after it!

Since you didn't write a book yet," I told Jamie Gold, Winner, 2006 WSOP,
Live At The Bicycle Casino, Bell Ca circa 2006

"the only thing I can imitate about your game is the Blueberries".

(He ate them constantly during the World Series,

and credits them with his win--because they are a super "brain food"

The Sex of Poker...

Buying into a poker game, unlike buying a car is a gamble that the future will represent an improved version of the past. And who knows whether that will be true? When it comes to NLH, what you don’t know is far more relevant than what you do know. Consider that many huge hands can be caused and sped up by their being unexpected, that case eight on the river for a suck out, a four card flush free roll.

With The Ambassador Of The World Poker Tour Vince Van Patten

Poker doesn't think. The cards have no mempry.

So many utopian ideas are about Finite Games: End Cancer, solve global warming, get people to be more rational, reduce violence, and so on. As wonderful as all those Quixotic achievements would (will!) be, there is something missing from them. Finite Game optimism suggests a circumscribed utopia, without frontier or mystery. The result isn't sufficiently inspiring for me- and I turned to poker because poker doesn't think! It is an infinite game; the overall phenomenon of NLH has no end. It is always a frontier, always on the edge.

I consider myself an average player, except for the fact that I consider myself an average player. NLH is too random to be left up to chance-Unplanned discoveries--you can't predict them but you know where they can come from and you know how they will affect you.

Poker is cool because the "greed is good" meme in the 80s, and the "rules don't apply to the rich" 90s (think Enron, Worldcom, dotcom). don't apply.Poker is the new Religion, the new golf, the old wine in a new bottle astrology and magic It helps us with our daily problems by teaching us how to avoid misfortune and how to account for it when it strikes.

Some notes...Poker is too random to be left up to chance...

Pig Lipstick---renaming something unpleasant to get more mileage outof it... AKA, putting lipstick on a pig. Poker is too random to be leftup to chance---I was fooled by randomness. I needed a miracle, a shift in thinking about my unknown unknows in my game.that retrofitting of stories we create to explain my loses because my brain wasn't a laptop.The tip of another iceberg: the knowledge of uncertainty that built my winning streak, that beginner's luck...

Pain For Sale

Decisions are bets on the future, and they aren’t ‘right’ or ‘wrong’based on whether they turn out well on any particular iteration. An unwanted result doesn’t make our decision wrong if we thought about the alternatives and probabilities in advance and allocated our resources accordingly.

― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

When we think probabilistically, we are less likely to use adverse results alone as proof that we made a decision error, because we recognize the possibility that the decision might have been good but luck and/or incomplete information (and a sample size of one) intervened.

― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

Hello, My Name is I,M ALL IN

The Longest Journey begins with...a cash advance from an ATM.

"Money can't buy happiness but it can buy chips which is kinda the same thing"-

The sex of Poker is really a game of mistakes and the greatest one is rooted in pleasure. The fine line we walk between success and self-destruction comes down to asking that one dirty (Harry) question rooted in the loner cop’s message of personal freedom, “Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?”

Poker is a game of situations. Winning poker is about making good decisions Feeling lucky and going to a casino is like feeling athletic and going to a sports bar. It’s a bad decision. It is the in to your sane, a kind of voluntary madness. The surest way of getting nothing from something. The road less traveled-the psycho path!

The Power Of Impossible Thinking

Getting what you deserve is boring. Having pocket AA, and raking a small pot, just won’t do it. There has to be risk and ambiguity. Don’t you feel more energized when you’re uncertain of the outcome of a hand. When you do a three barrel bluff, don’t you feel more alive, your heart jumping out of your chest, you sweat, your take that dry mouth swallow. I think that a subconscious desire to return to this state affects my game. I bluff too much because I want to experience the feeling I get at these moments…. when you get him to fold top pair, when a scare card is on the turn..This is poker at its finest: If you can think impossible thoughts, you can do impossible things.

If you had a normal “addiction” to, say, crack or sex-there are group therapies for that-but being addicted to “risk” in the poker culture just makes makes you a gambler. Is that so bad, you are wired to invest? Don't they call that arbitrage on Wall Street? Isn't gambling a fundamental brick in the foundation of economic and investment thinking.

Poker points to gambling. Gambling points to math. Math points to risk. Risk points to investing. Investing points to finance; and finance points to economics, and economics points back to gambling

1. Bad Beats are Overhead;Chips, The Cost of Doing Business As Usual

In Blackjack, there is always a correct decision, a perfect strategy. NLH, on the other hand, is a game of completing the puzzle of partial information; where players make inferences and “investments” under uncertainty. Fixed strategies don’t work because players don’t always act perfectly. You are, above all else, playing against other people, and conditions change.

No Limit Hold ‘em or NLH is designed to have a high luck factor that can quite easily lead to a sort of pathological optimism. It’s a fast, easy to understand game that pulls down huge bucketfuls of short-term luck. In fact, playing because you are “feeling lucky” is (almost) the right way to play.

Yet, the right way to play NLH and (almost) the right way to play is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. I don’t want to steal your thunder but that’s what luck is--- the Thunder. Thunder is a good thing , thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does all the work and gets the job done, and it doesn’t strike twice in the same place because the same place isn’t there anymore.

The sex of poker therefore can be misery. It no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it. The remarkable thing about luck is no matter how bad it gets, it can always get worse. Luck is a strange teacher. It gives the test first, the lesson afterwards. Luck is your university. The chips are your report card. Everything proceeds from there.

While it is true that it is the mark of an inexperienced player not to believe in luck, luck doesn’t always believe in you--- Luck is pauperized ecstasy because it lends but never gives. When you’re buying in to feeling lucky, there is plenty of pain for sale. It is easier to change your religion than your diet, and in the buffet of luck may have no calories, but everyone eventually goes home hungry.

If Pain is weakness leaving the body, then Poker pain is weakness leaving your game. It is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into--- the poker frequency. Do you play in-frequently? Is that one word or two?

Playing too many starting hands in a standard $2-$4 NL game is weakness. You should have a 20-30% view of the flop percentage. This means folding, saying “No” to AJ in first position, KT in middle position and QT in late position Just saying `no', to every hand, however prevents bad playing the way “Have a nice day” cures chronic depression. A Jackass who persists in his recklessness, nevertheless becomes a smartass.

2.Eating What You Kill Is So Money!

You can't spell Manslaughter without laughter, so when you eat what you kill, make sure your opponents are having a good time. It’s not some felony conviction; more of a firm belief in magic, the process of putting the con back in confidence and creating community, paying them off with social currency.

You are not keeping up with the Joneses. You’re dragging them down to your level on the green felt jungle. It’s not how good you are. It’s how bad you want it. The quest is in the question of not, “ Who is going to let me?” Rather, “Who is going to stop me?” Power is never given. Power is taken.

Losing Holdem ASAP is about putting that monkey on your opponents back; the “hundredth monkey” that creates a critical mass of change in how they view your “table Presence” As they start believing your own B.S., your third eye and turd eye are one--- Shift Happens! Poker appears to be ’ user friendly. After all, it takes a minute to learn …and a lifetime to master. It isn’t user friendly, it’s user illusionary.

The cards are just there to confuse the bad players, the Hellen Keller’s. It’s not what you look at that matters but what you see. You don’t need cards to win. You need cards to lose. Try=Fail.The illusion of control is like pushing an elevator button and thinking it will arrive faster. You can however push people’s buttons, and get them to do things faster, like calling your “All in” when you flop the nuts, an unbeatable hand, or folding when they have the best hand. Your mind can't tell the difference between what it sees and what it remembers. Nerons that wire together fire together. You have this social situation, where you get to create your own reality, your own table presence.

The Playah puts the odds back into God--- a Megalomaniac who not only must confuse his thoughts with gods, but gets you to believe in his thoughts. Your reality check will not bounce because you create your own reality. It’s your world, others are just a tourist in it and eventually, their own. They believe a monster truck is coming toward them, they will always jump out of the way. So keep on truckin, They have been gas lighted. “Let there be flop”….

In poker, "the nuts" refers to not only an unbeatable hand, It is also an unbeatable style of playah, a raisey-crazy one -man asylum., whose default mode of betting suffers from Jim Carey’s “advanced delusionary schizophrenia with involuntary narcissistic rage.” An adrenaline junkie with demented energy, grandiose plans, he like being feared. It imbues him with an intoxicating sensation of omnipotence. The Playah is inebriated by the looks of horror or repulsion on people's faces, as they fold with the best hand as you bluff--The poisoned joy to the poker world of depriving others of what you don’t have, a legitimate hand.

The crime and punishment for playing with the Playah is a malignant optimism. He plays a one-handed game of "Good Cop, Bad Cop" with different people. Stiring the pot, triangulating and pitting one against another. Gossip may be false intimacy but Torture is the ultimate act of his perverted intimacy. A kind of Traumatic bonding", akin to the Stockholm Syndrome, takes place… You are his “Supply” he is your change agent—He find you; gets you,to love him; make you eventually hate him. That’s fine with him---He love to be hated and he hate to be loved The Playah uses use up other people like candy bars, and when he’s finished eating , he throw away the wrappers. Disposable relationships. No deposit. No return.

In RL (Real Life), When you define me you negate me, but in NLH, --- Love Thy Label As Thy Self. This Perception Shifting is the Most Promising to Define a New Space for winning at NLH. . Playahs need a reputation to live up to and tend to become whomever people see us as. Most of life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Players tend to confuse habits with identity. When asked WHO they are, most people resort to communicating their habits. Get into rearranging. Native American Indians on Caribbean Islands couldn't see Columbus's ships sitting on the horizon because they were beyond their knowledge. You don’t see it then believe it. You believe it then you see it.

3. Motivated by Noise and Money

Poker is a struggle for silence, and never interrupt an opponent when he is making a mistake. With the license of the brothel and the silence of the cloister, the Playah provides the loophole that allows the whore to climb into your game. With your Wal-Mart table presence-- huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, the Playah devours all his ” rivals in his lust to expand. You operates in a world of overwhelming force, supply and command, While the TV audience supplies new players who demand action. Without new players, good Playahs wouldn’t make any profit.

A “rush” is a winning streak. When you are on one, it’s like drinking from a fire hydrant. Everybody knows you can’t park anywhere near that place. There is a certain larceny in getting more for less, a bit of cheating when the money faucet is Niagara Falls. You have no reason to believe the well will ever dry up. So you drive the bus, by looking in the rear view mirror. Caution, objects appear closer than they actually are!

How you do chips is how you do life. Chips are congeled energy and releasing them releases holdem’s possibilities. Energy, however follows the path of least resistance, and most beginning players are calling stations, and/or over bet preflop, and under bet post flop.

4. Poker Rewards (selective)Aggression

Being normal. It is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful and unimaginative. Ask your mother. Normal is the setting on her washing machine. Normal isn't a virtue. It denotes a lack of poker courage. You have to be Madonna, constantly reinventing yourself. Otherwise, it’s a vast, conforming suburb of the soul. You don’t want to be normal. Normal people spend their lives avoiding tense situation, Poker Playahs spend their lives getting into them. The whole upshot of NLH is that it be a perpetual crisis that you create. The Phish is the last one to know it is in the ocean. Phush swim in it. Players surf on it. Failure to plan creates crisis in RL (Real Life) In NLH, planning for crisis eliminates failure. This is a Poker Mini-Satori- You abhor monotony and constancy, equating them, in your mind, with death. Seek upheaval, drama, and change.

God may play dice with the universe,, but this ain’t no metaphysical crapshoot, it’s NLH. If you want to have “fun” then spin the wheel of fortune, phone a friend, buy a vowel, and get voted off the island. Deal or No Deal. If you want an “experience”, play NLH. It’s not a sport, it’s a concussion! Good NLH poker is not a "A-ha" experience, it is more of a "holy-shit" experience. Most playahs are experience rich and technique poor. Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again. Someday, this books will start to read like one long typographical error, and you come away thinking, “From now on, I'll connect the dots my own way”. 'It’s like football - if you don't wear a helmet and pads, you're going to get hurt.. This book is your equipment. It is a contact sport, and the more contact you have with other players, the more you will win.

You simply can’t play a solid, safe game. Anyone who plays poker within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. You have to get in there and gamble.. Aggression makes you money. And the trouble with NLH is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more. Poker very simply, rewards aggression. Aggression is the main source of energy for the NL playah.. NLH is about aggression and domination- it’s a playah’s only redeeming qualities. When everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough. Due to the effect of community cards, hold'em is a game of "domination. A hand is dominated if it has 3 or fewer outs against another, like AQ against AK.

The price of aggression, however, is not cheap. You have to be willing to lose in order to win. Aggression causes trouble. The trouble is you must use extreme self-discipline. If you cannot obey yourself you will be commanded by someone else’s play You cannot control the luck factor, but skill is something over which you have control, and you have the power to gain yet greater skill by becoming a Playah. A playah is just looking for opportunities, not guarantees. Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t amateur hour, this is gambling. All of life is risk exercise. It’s the only way to live more freely and interesting. Dream with your eyes open.

Aggression causes pressure and pressure makes diamonds and diamonds last forever--- It creates the mutant ability to do the impossible, win consistently at NLH. You deserve to win consistently, and the minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for. But you don’t get what you deserve in poker, you get what you negotiate, and you better be good at negotiating risk.

In NLH, betting is far better than calling. That’s aggression. When you bet, you can win if you have the better hand or if your opponent folds. If you call, you can only win if you have your opponent beaten. If you bet, you determine the bet size. You determine the pot odds. If you call, you are accepting someone else's odds.

If you bet, you force people to pay you off when you have a good hand. If you are a caller, you have to hope someone else will willingly pay you off. The importance of aggression is why tight-passive players can win a lot more at Limit than No-Limit. If you were arrested for aggression would there be enough evidence for the poker police to convict you?

The gambling world is a kind of gambling kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell "Poker" with the wrong blocks.. You got “T” testosterone, that’s good, you’re gonna want that, You got “A”, aggression , that's even better you're gonna want and need that, too. You can’t spell danger without anger, and every NLH needs to feel dangerous.But any two year old kid can throw a fit! NLH is about controlling that aggression , harnessing that aggression into a series of wins. Only people who die very young learn all they really need to know in kindergarten.

The antidote to anger is patience, and as we already know: infinite patience brings immediate results to your game. Yet the opposite of patience is aggression. We have this paradox. We are learning that NLH is more subtle and multiple than conventional 'either-or' limits have allowed. Our imaginations have some catching up to do. The power not of positive thinking but paradoxical thinking. The nearer you are to paradox, the nearer you are to beating the game.

5.The Power of Paradoxical Thinking. Don’t cheng unless you ch’i

If you want to perform optimally at NLH, then you have to be paradoxical . In NLH you have to have your cake and eat it too. This is not either or duals and duality. Welcome to the world of “and”. Doing two things at the same time that apparently negate each other. NLH is 100% skill and 100% luck. The language of "and" is the language of NLH. The language of "and" is the language of passive and active, optimystical and materialistic, hard and soft. There’s a yang for every yin. It’s Fuzzy logic, and everything is a matter of degree and the player is fuzzy wuzzy to the nth degree. Get a clear, sharp view of the fuzzy.

The best way to protect yourself is to be as fluid and formless as water.

Control The Options: Get Others To Play With The Cards You Menally DealGeneration Terrorist- Keep Others In Suspended Terror: Cultivate An Air Of Unpredictability. A placebo ---Latin for "I shall please"

On a psychological level, there are other ways of changing perspective and opening up your game. Getting a miracle case 9 on the river for a full boat-- a dramatic and startling experience can completely alter our understanding of the game, making us into new playah Sometimes the experience can be so overwhelming, it is as if we have shifted into a new dimension, as if our minds have expanded by a Power of 10.

The Strangerhood-

Between the paradox of holding back and holding on comes the midpoints. TheABC midpoints of NLH---The energy of Anger, Boredom and Craze (enthusiasm). Being healthy in poker is having the same diseases as your neighbors. The nearer you are to paradox the nearer you are to healing the hurt that comes from going broke. It’s not either/or. On the one hand, on the other, I’m up, on the other I’m down. It’s one long game. Admit to third options.. Reframe it, You have an an infinite number of third options. IS NLH an all or nothing proposition. different things come from separate places' into 'apparently different things may come from the same place---you may win, you may lose, but what does that really mean. Do not think in extreme "black-or-white" terms but use continuums instead! Do not think in words like "always, never, every time, everyone".

For a Playah, discipline doesn’t mean to punish, it doesn’t even mean to control behavior, when you are self-disiplined you are becoming your own disciple, and your game gets more interesting. It leads to self-respect, and the ability to say no is key----No to playing too many hands first and foremost. No to under-estimating how much of your profit comes from AA,KK,AK, No to playing suited mongo (trash) out of position and for more than one raise outside of your blinds. The key to NLH is laying down big hands no matter what the table encourages you to do. My Bad (My fault) is you don’t remember this one.

We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons."

Go within or go without winning. Live from the inside out. What we know inside always exceeds what we know from the outside. Beliefs are what you learn from the outside; knowledge is what you know from the inside.

6. The randomness of NLH is too important to be left to chance!

NLH is mostly not about cards, it’s about people. To get around this problem, All decisions should be randomly generated. Every time that the same situation occurs, you should act as if it has never occurred before and randomly decide whether to Raise, Fold or Bluff. You might go 10 times in a row or more without bluffing, or you might bluff six times in a row. Choose an action that leaves your opponent with no way to take advantage of it. The mess is the message

The best-kept secret is held by one, but what if you knew all your opponents’ hole cards, all his secrets. Would you have played the same way? If the answer is yes, then they have no secrets to keep and you have profited, they have lost. If the answer is no, if you would have played differently, then they have gained, and you have lost.

More than that, If your opponents play their hands differently from the way they would have if they could see all your cards, they made a mistake and you profit; and if they play their hands the same way they would have played if they could see all your cards, they played correctly, and you lose.

7. Why Be A Man When You Can Be A Success?

Few teams win back- to -back championships. Because nothing fails like success You set yourself up to be your own Judge Judy and executioner. It is the greatest injustice you perpetrate upon yourself when you play in your CZ (Comfort Zone), the safety net of being a winner. If it works, it’s obsolete. Doing things “right” the first time is an obscenity. Built to last I s yesterdays idea, There is no yes in yesterday.If you talk about the past you have no future. It’s a sure fire way to have your winnings sequestered.

Nothing lasts forever in NLH. You might as well get used to the expression, “Don’t worry, and It’ll change”. Getting what you expect is boring.

In the RW(Real World) change is seen as some “thing” containing lastingness, permanent press. Would you rather have a TEMPORARY change to your game that lasts as long as it is useful, or rather a LASTING change that continues to last far beyond any limits of usefulness. A poker game is not static. It's a dynamic, living organism that changes from moment to moment. You have to respond to those changes. You have to be the change you want to see in your poker world. Any given game is a Living system, with environmental conditions, adaptation, life cycles, recycling, needs, homeostasis, evolution, survival of the fittest, health, illness.

Poker is 100% skill and 199% luck. Information is the difference that makes a difference. Information is surprises. We all expect the world to work out in certain ways, but when it does, we're bored. What makes something worth knowing is organized around the concept of expectation failure. You learn something when things don't turn out the way you expected.

The greatest temptation for a winning player is to repeat the things he did to get there. Winning at the poker table is like milk, with an expiration date stamped right on the carton. Pretty soon, you’ll be in deep yogurt. If your game is not broke, break it, and more than that, break it before someone else does. You have to continually switch gears, and mix it up.

Ignorance is blistering. Imagine someone of average intelligence. Now consider that half the Poker world is dumb and dumber. They have put the odd back into god. Laziness is the religion of the 21st century player. Players have more leisure than money. Their cash can’t buy happiness, but it can buy chips which is kinda the same thing.

Happiness, isn’t good enough for the Playah , he demands euphoria. It is a form of energy that tends to make you more of who you already are. Hearing the mantra “Tight is Right” is really “Procrastinate Now” but that’s a “I only want to win” strategy. You”ll be forever in the control of things you can't give up, your chips.

8. Vene, Vidi, Velcro: "I came, I saw, I stuck around” ---Teach Yourself Poker in 10 Years (Why is everybody in such a rush!)

NLH is not that Spanish story about a guy named “Manual”. There are no playbooks, no rules and no rulers. The Playah change the rules. He creates his own game. The Playah is the measure of all things. His money talks. It’s present tense grammar is a slang that spits on the street, rolls up its sleeve and gets to work. The Playah is at the center of gravity, and you are in the vortex of his personal twister, a black hole which sucks your energy and resources dry .The aim of the playahs language is to throw others off the scent and obtain a supply of more chips. When you grow up, do you want to be a Global Village Idiot?

Damn it, this isn’t brain surgery; It’s rocket science! We have guided missiles and misguided players who forget the cards always have the first move. They act, you react. ---a traitorous mistress that sometimes has to be gang raped into submission.You are always in a state of not knowing. You never know how soon is too late because at anytime, anyone, including you, can go “All-In” and risk everything. The important thing, nevertheless, is not to be in the know, but to be in the now. Good poker comes through you not from you. It’s a gift, that’s why they call it, the present. Open it up!

If practice makes perfect, and nobody's perfect, then why practice? There is absolutely no substitute in NLH than for a genuine lack of preparation.. A NLH session is one long conversation run by C students, and Cash is their report card. NLH is like high school with money. Dare to be naïve. This is a world beyond the classroom besides getting the correct answer. Few playahs save for a rainy day. Playahs are perennially ill-prepared. avoided and ignored, rendered transparent by their checkered past.

Keeping players in the dark so that when you spike the bluff, they have that deer in the headlights look---frozen disbelief. Heads or tails? In the dark both are correct. If I turn on the light, I "collapse" the superposition, and force the coin to be either heads or tails by measuring it. Never show your cards.

How to build a time machine…

A broken clock is right twice a day ,just like a square circle no one can win lose all the time. If you play badly long enough sooner or later you will win. The fact that so many people are playing NLH makes unlikely events almost certain.. With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen . The one chance in a million will undoubtedly occur despite extremely long odds, someone will eventually win the WSOP because millions of people play. This is not magical thinking. It’s The Law of truly Large Numbers. The mathematical Law of Large Numbers states in essence that if an event is given enough opportunities to occur, sooner or later it will occur. The one chance in a million will undoubtedly occur, with no less and no more than its appropriate frequency, however surprised we may be that it should occur to us.'

9. The Free Agency

The casino is the ultimate playground of Free Agency. The plug-and-play low entry point is one that anyone from waitress moms to NASCAR dads can move into and put together a life---or at least a facsimile of a life ---in less than a month. There are charities for the homeless There are charities for the homeless. The casino is for the homely default lottery- Ka-ching- mentality of wish fulfillment, a portable magic. Most want to go through the revolving door of poker on luck’s push. Do yourself a favor and avoid the free ride.

Like Temporary ("flexible") workers you are paid a premium to compensate for not having job security. Like owning your own business, you only have to work half a day. You can do anything you want with the other twelve hours! Got poker? It’s like, Got Milk?” with an expiration date stamped right on the carton. It's never too late to be what you might have been if you start now.

Play Poker It’s like applying for citizenship in the Gaming World. NLH is a form of patriotism, It is not the last refuge of a scoundrel, but the home of the free and brave declaration of independents who stick to the old school values: life, liberty, and the pursuit of a fast buck. There is no treason, You can not be a traitor to anything, except to yourself.

All Players are created unequal. All Playahs are cremated equal. . Being "on fire" is misleading in poker. Usually it's the fire that's on you. It is not some spontaneous combustion, about the match being too close to the gasoline. You must first set yourself on fire. When you released from the burn center, (of bad beats, and your own idiosyncratic mistakes) you start to see things more clearly: This is the Fuzzier Side of the ROI of NLH. Fire can be our friend, whether it's toasting s'mores or raining down on Charlie.

10. Few things are harder to put up with than a good example

The assumption that gambling is bad has outlived its usefulness. If it wasn't for pimps, prostitutes, hustlers, gangsters there wouldn't be any poker. There was a time when one could almost be afraid to call himself a playah because it meant so much kneecapping.

Now anyone can do it with complete ease, because it means nothing at all, thanks to the CNN effect of dealing with everywhere and everything at once, including the WPT and WSOP. You cannot avoid poker paradise. You can only avoid seeing it. The sign in the window reads, “Sorry, we’re open 24/7” The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. NLH is the speed of light. 24 hour casinos-I haven’t got time for that.

11.Are You Experienced?

Wisdom is shared experienced---Thanks for sharing-Phil, Doyle, and David. “Beast Out”-on Helmuth’s tool box, Play Poker Like the Pros and it’s a poor workman who blames his tools of its core message---Only play premium hands and play those hands aggressively. Doyle’s Super System is the Rosetta Stone, the black box,the flight recorder when your game crashes. For all you Pi in the sky math atheists, Sklansky’s, Theory of Poker will make you a believer, deifying pot odds and probability. They are among the best techniques. The sum of their thick information is accurate. Yet everyone of these techniques is a trap. The tricky thing is you have to be trapped by them for them to work. Go into their books knowing you’ll be trapped, with a trust, that once they work, they will self-destruct.

When you played Stratego on a rainy weekend, you were just pretending to take over the world; when you play NLH, you actually are, one player at a time. It’s a game of domination. Is there life before death in poker? If you don’t create your own whole NLH world, you will certainly die in other peoples, NLH is so perplexing to the fish/phish --- he’s not used to being in a situation where he has to figure out what to do each and every moment. For him, NLH is just another way to gamble, one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking, a kind of yuppie version of bulimia for the guy with 3C’s-cash, condo and cars. A Yuppie on a poker table is like a time bomb. That bomb has got to be defused so playahs can approach it without fear. There’s no better way of doing that with a raise

Road Dawg’s high-speed chase to nowhere is your now here You’re good at opening up the present---the gift called now. You have found your “Calling Station”. Nothing makes this kind of player more vulnerable than playing every hand to a showdown.

The fish thinks he only has to learn how to play by the rules. He’s wardrobe consists of two t-shirts; the one says “But They Were Suited”, the other, “Take My Money”, He plays like a sledgehammer. Gorden Gekko’s greed is not good.

When all he has is a Sledge-bankroll, every hand to him seems like hours of fun. It’s a poor workman who blames his tools but if the only tool you have is that hammer, then everything you see begins to look like a nail. . The nails that stands up to this kind of player , is not getting pounded down. He ends up buying a new BMW’s and having stock options in (Blue Horse Shoe Loves) Anacot Steel

12. Lack Of Money Is The Root Of All Poker Evil

You can’t play poker without money, and lack of money is the root of all poker evil. "You wanna play NLH? That's gonna take a lot of mirror! Every playah has roots once in a while in an insufficient bankroll. Playing short stacked is the last resort--- like paying for a ten-day vacation and arriving on day seven. It’s like selling the car for gas money. The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. You work yourself up from nothing to a state of supreme poverty with re-buy after re-buy.

It’s not whether the playah loses a hand , but how he loses and how he’s changed because of it and what he take away from it that he never had before, to apply to other hands, other players. This kind of losing, in a curious way, is winning. How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win again. So what--- that you’ve lost all your money. Luckily, you will still have everybody else’s. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. . It is when we lose everything purposefully - that we gain it back.

13. White Angry Hold Em--- My invisible internet friends

Vegas got Amazoned. Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete and started all over again in the user-friendly universe of location neutral Casino @nyware. The “Open Source” world that everybody is smarter than anybody doesn’t apply in Internet NLH. One of us is smarter than all of us. The herd is wrong. Let me get ghetto on you-it's the white people version of looting. Home isn’t where their heart is it’s where their computer is,.. The napsterization of cutting out the brick and mortar middleman by partypoker.com and others have created Alpha geek---get rich click-- students and beta freak--tweeds-to-riches—teachers high on silicon crack. While it is true that the quicker you go the longer it can take, when you think long you think wrong— To begin to think is to begin to be undermined. Decisions made very quickly from the gut, in poker can be every bit as good as those made carefully and deliberately! Internet players are no miraculous exception. They make snap judgements and decisions fast. There really is no correlation to time and effort spent on a decision and the outcome. Analysis is paralysis or another why to put it Paralysis by analysis! Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not power, but applied knowledge is. The longer and harder you think about something, we usually assume, the better you think about it, and when you assume you make an ass out of U and ME. Go with your best guess.

Take your hate off Adolph- I was a teanage Nazi sympathizer…Play poker like the Pros….and go broke. If you play like Gus, you will go broke.

You don’t need powerpoint to explain it. You don’t know why you knew but you knew. This feeling of knowing in the first two seconds is not a gift given to the few. What is deeply personal is universal, It can be cultivated. Common sense,, however is not so common. It is possible to know without knowing why you know and accept it. Internet Playahs are capable of making sense of situations based on the thinnest portion of experience. Poker ooms are really in the art business. Limit poker is to NLH poker what paint-by-numbers is to art. NLH artists have to live out loud.That’s just the way the cookie crumbles, er I mean that's just the way the cookie gets completely stomped on and obliterated. A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their bad habits. Art is anything you can get away with.

The “Open Source” world that everybody is smarter than anybody doesn’t apply in NLH. One of us is smarter than all of us. The herd is wrong.

This is poker not confession. Poker is a struggle against silence. Betrayal oozes out of every pore, there’s chatter in the finger tips, happy feet, the breath. NLH is fraught with opportunities to keeps one's mouth shut."The little voices inside the playahs head want the other guy to shut up but then you realize--- Never interrupt your opponent when he is making a mistake. Everything bad is good for you, and NLH is bad to the bone. Most players lead lives of quit desperation. Playahs are artists, and artists have to live out loud. The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in. Be original.

He who hesitates is not only lost, but several miles from the next freeway exit.The poker highway is full of magical rides patiently waiting for our wits to test drive. Bad Beats are the potholes in the road of NLH. The way is to act not compete. You're either part of the steamroller or part of the pavement. Putting the sin back in sincere is not the highway to hell. Its not a major sin, so you only go to heck. It’s just an I’m the boss applesauce tude. Putting the con back in confidence, Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent. If everything seems to be coming your way, you're probably in the wrong lane. Cowboy up, and Begin again.

14.Last Is Basically Best

Remember, NLH is a game of high cards.. Remember, NLH is a game of high cards. “Let there be flop.” “The geeks shall inherit the earth,” and The first shall be last and the last shall be first. No where is this more true than in holdem. NLH is a game of position. The power of position is your super power.

Last is basically best. Pretty hands turn into pretty ugly hands quickly relative to position. If you're betting in early position, you don't have the information yet on the other hands that someone in late position will have. All good players will tend to play more hands when they are in late position and less hands when they are in early position. A Beginer/limit player has no sense of the importance of (betting) position. The most common trap hands are AT, AJ, KQ, KJ, KT, QJ and QT.from early position.

Many people are overly aggressive and too loose pre flop, and too tight post flop The best position is on the button, right in front of the small blind. It is in this position that you will posses the most information when your turn to act arrives. When sitting on the button you will know how many players are in the pot, if there has been a raise/re-raise, etc. This is most certainly the most profitable position.

I don't suffer from tilt. I am a carrier!!! The Broken Escalator Phenomenon: When Autopilot Takes Over.Ah! The limit Table-- I spent a year there one weekend. It’s All About The Jackson’s’Hell is other people and you can usually find them at the 3/6and 2/4 limit games. A good Limit player is basically a high-functioning autistic who has no idea how NLH people do it . It is a recipe for permanent mediocrity. The middle of the road may be where the white line is, and the limit player walks the walk and talks the talk down that line, but it is the worst place to drive in NLH. Limit is a science, but NLH is an art, the difference between checkers and chess.. If it keeps you awake, it’s art; if it puts you to sleep, it’s a drug. Limit players are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. Everybody pities weak limit players; jealousy you have to earn. For those of you without hope, we have Limit poker rooms with color TV, cable and air conditioning It is the most original torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. I didn’t fully understand the fatal term terminal illness, until I played in a 2/4 limit game.

Bounty after the mutiny. Expecting the other playahs to treat you fairly because you are a good guy is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian. Bulls, however, do not win bull fights. It’s all about the Hamilton’s.

15. Instant Poker

Infinite patience brings immediate results to your game. How do you spell success in poker? T.I.M.E. Time is one of your most valuable assets, We Americans are in a time famine, while the rest of the world, (the axis of evil)---the 100 million people on this planet that make less than $2 a day, are time millionaires. Some of them come over here, and make great playahs. Nevertheless, Spontaneity is not random. It is a function of your training, practice. And rehearsal. .Don’t always expect everyday change to happen slowly and steadily or for there to be some relationship between cause and effect. And when there isn't -- when you win a big jackpot for no apparent reason, or when you make it to the final table in a tournament, don’t be surprised..

Holdem’s Looney-tuned tension gets its storyline from the Cartoon Network. In a New York minute, an ACME anvil pancakes you, and then a split second later, you’re expanded - accordion-style - back to normal, like some tempurpedic mattress. It’s a formula of ins and outs, need and speed, aggravation and acceleration.

NLH is a game of domination. It rewards (selective) aggression. Infinite patience, however, brings immediate results to your game. The game has gotten faster, yet the faster you go, the longer it takes to beat the game. You spell success in NLH, T_I._M_.E_.

In the United States of Unconscious gambling, we Star Strangled Bastards can’t get enough of what we don’t want, don’t need and don’t know. —S.A.D. the Standard American Diet, Uncle Sam’s unhappy default mode of doing the same stuff over and over again; and expecting a different result. NLH really put the c*nt in country, a metaphor for the most valuable thing on the planet Sorry We’re open 24 hours a day---like some vast and unimaginable mall, opening her legs to receive us all. But your quest to beat the game will be turning into 25/8.

16. Drawing to the nuts is napalm

Nothing else in the world smells like that. Smells like victory When you start losing and you hear yourself saying that, it’s the lesser known "I don't have a dream" speech.

You cannot get ahead while you are getting even (Chasing). The word winning would lose its meaning if it weren’t for losing. Losing motivates -- it never compensates. And motivation is the key to NLH. No noose is not good news Nothing focuses the mind as a noose around your neck., like going all-in, and drawing to the nuts. Try it sometime. A flopped set over set situation ranks right up there with the mother of all ex[periences. especially when you have top set, then river quads for basically the stone-cold-mortal nuts.

17.The Secret Of Staying Young----lying about your age.

Happy 120th birthday---Staying healthy may be the slow way to die, but The secret to staying young in NLH is lying about your age! In poker, we’re obsolete at ever-younger ages.NLH, like professional sports, has a way of making 30 year old men feel decrepit. Twenty is the new 30. Your poker life is too short to play bad cards. Stay healthy with strong starting hands AA,KK,QQ,AK Suited. It is the slow way to die. Pay attention to the number of hands going to showdowns. Showdown Percentage is a critical concept in no-limit hold'em. Since no-limit lends itself to bluffing, one can make a lot of money simply by stealing pots if your opponents have a “Right is tight” approach. However, this strategy obviously fails if everyone shows you down at the river.

Gowing old in poker isn’t optional, growing up is. The only thing tender about you is your legal tender. Nothing but frenemies at the table. They are bilingual; they speak English and profanity. Putting the ick in dick, a form of disorderly conduct in which the score is kept with chips. Just like there is no business like showbusiness, that’s right it’s show business, not show friends--- There's No Limit Like No-limit.

It’s hard to make a comeback when you haven’t been anywhere. What doesn’t demolish you , makes you tougher. The future is already here it’s just not evenly distributed yet. How do you predict the future? You create it buy sitting at a table with the wallet bearing crowd and exploit their affliction, the “house money effect”. The future you see is the future you get. We are inventing the future of NLH every day we go to play. It will happen with or without us.

Kindly let me help you or you will drown," said the monkey putting the fish safely up in a tree. The ultimate goal is to separate these fish from the sea, leaving them exposed to good play. NLH is designed to achieve an important balance: any Jones (unskilled player) must be able to win just enough hands to keep them at the table rocketing. One of the ways you can recognize a Jones is by what they win with. For a player to win he has to show his cards. If a player wins with a 8 and a 2 off suit, you know you've got low hanging fruit.

The longer the playah lives – the more average he becomes.

18. Winning Is A Way Of Turning Money Into Problems

It’s a misfortune that never misses. It’s the price we pay because we don't want to pay the price to lose. NLH is never finished, only abandoned---It’s a zero sum game, somebody wins, somebody loses. Chips aren’t lost or made, simply transferred from one Party of One to another. The assumption that gambling is only about the money has outlived its usefulness. A player that count their chips at the table, is like a hooker who looks at her watch. They are missing the point. They see Cindy Crawford, when the reality is only the mole. NLH is not just about money anymore. It’s about winning.

Having a huge chip stack are weapons of mass distraction because the house money effect of playing with “their” chips takes over but there is no their there. It’s all yours. If you don’t figure this out regime change is in the air you’ll run your fortune into a shoestring, trying to prop up your ailing dictatorship, defending your status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status. Nothing says “Obey Me” more, however, than a large chip stack. "In poker, stasis = death."

Motion creates emotion. M.A.D. No nukes is good nukes, Mutual Assured Destruction. When you put emotion into your game, You pull the handgranade and blow up everyone. The herd is usually wrong. Good NLH playahs thinkers are like comedians: they test boundaries and challenge the status quo. Capitalism is often refered to as Creative destruction. Get the wrecking ball ready

A BIG Project is so vastly expensive and complicated that people cannot understand it, so they assume that those working on it understand it. It gets green lit. A big chip stack has the same effect—People back down.

Boredom is the only thing that can help you to make correct decisions. It comes from knowing what you are doing. The cream always rises in boredom; your submerged best play comes to the surface.

Laziness is the religion of the 21st century player. What we have here is a failure to excommunicate the notion that sometimes nothing is a good hand. Our “Procrastinate Now!” Right is tight is wrong. You sit there waiting for the deck to hit you, and it will. Try raising with nothing . You’ve got to get creative. You’ve got to mix it up. The flop misses everybody 2/3 of the time, and NLH lends itself to bluffing a small bet in or out of position can take it down. Playing suited connectors 89 and J10. "Sell the sizzle not the steak," makes everyone a vegetarian for a while. It works great—until the player tries the steak.

The Playah not only puts himself in your shoes before he took your shirt, he waits patiently for that shoe to drop! He knows instant gratification, when it is merchandised as a commodity, takes too long. The Casino is a wish-fulfillment striptease for the all-consuming Afluenza crowd. Leisure is more available than money and money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy chips, which is kind of the same thing. So you dig into your pocket and re-buy.

With the license of the brothel and the silence of the cloister, the Playah provides the loophole that allows the whore to climb into your game. With his Wal-Mart table presence-- huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, he devours all his ” rivals in his lust to expand. The Playah operates in a world of overwhelming force, supply and command, While the poker economy supplies new players who demand action. Without new players, good Playahs wouldn’t make any profit.

19.Get Even — Get Odd! Casual Misanthropy

Henry Ford said you could have the Model T in any color as long as it was black. When you go head to head with the Playah, your “I for an I” will leave you blind in a black room looking for a black car that isn’t there. You may be the engine, but the playah does the steering. Your Blue book value? Nonexistent.

Does he really have that kind of juice? No. He’s altered your thinking. He’s made you a fan. You’ve been played. Hate the game, not the player. It’s poker. He’s a Poker Playah, the opposite of people. Poker is not a civilized situation, it’s an heroic one.We can't all be heroes. Someone has to sit on the curb and clap as you go by. . You could quit anytime, but chooses to call with marginal hands, redoubling their efforts while forgetting their aim which was to win.

If you dream to become the “Dian Fossey” of this NLH poker jungle, to become one of “them”, and then study “their” behavior from the inside and tap into this vibe, then read ,The Sex of Poker. It may not get you in Who’s Who, but it can certainly tell you “What’s What” about the monkey and the business. Drinking the company Kool-Aid and Tattoo the sex of poker logo on your chest. NLH is the modern Greek tragedy. You can basically go from Hero to zero. It’s good to be be king of the hill , married to the queen of the nights, and then, in one moment with one card left to come, all of a sudden, you’re sleeping with your mother and you poke your eyes out.

20.This Is Not That

Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use in NLH. Players seem to be violating the most basic most basic laws of the universe: Cause and effect, sowing and reaping, action and reaction. Even the law of gravity the law of gravity, figuratively jump off a cliff (with any two cards, in RL (Real Life) you’re going to plummet to the Earth below – 100% of the time, not in NLH. just KNOW it, the same way one "knows" about gravity – directly, immediately and assuredly. No cosmic immunity.

You get your Freak-onomics on with more = better. The temptation to get into the action is constant.. After all, in NLH, being safe is risky, and being risky is safe. Sandwiched in between that tipping point of no return and the law of diminishing ones is this one “great mistake” in your game, and this great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied with the simple realization that, sometimes enough is a feast. Because long-term planning is for Communists and poker is the most democratic form of gaming, you continue your casual misanthropy.

Allow me to sound like a thing from another tax bracket, and quote some proud members of the right wing conspiracy, “We rich are different. We know when to leave.” Remember Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing? Most of those guys knew when to bail. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. Most poker pigs end up making hogs of themselves. They never get disgruntled. You can never get enough of what you really don't want." If your goal is to "not lose ," you can have continual wins and still not have what you don't want.

Today’s poker is not necessarily a lapse of morality, but the result of a great social injustice. In your “W2” world, you name your own decimal dusted salary. He’s called Vinnie, and Mr. Bag-a-Donuts is always going to be having out of money experiences: because a funny thing happened while homeslice was pressing his nose to the grindstone: His world changed.---his joy-to-stuff ratio got out of balance, his office ennui Dilberted his Type T (Thrill) personality and he turned into an underemployed torpedo. Getting what you expect is boring, and another thing---you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate. Garbage hands win. In poker, what's supposed to happen really is happening. There’s the rub.\

.Respond to change. A poker game is not static. It's a dynamic, living organism that changes from moment to moment. You have to respond to those changes. Survival of the fittest. CEO salary distinct or extinct?

We are part of the best entertained and least informed people on the face of the planet, free v to change spouses, jobs, careers, neighborhoods; but the way he gamble? Players don't resist change. They resist being changed! Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget, neither does your house of cards. You have to work hard at failing.

21.Denial Is Not Just a River In Vegas

The “house” takes 5 percent, but what's 5 percent of a dream? A nightmare. There is wise and otherwise--- winners and losers--- AmeriCAN’s and AmeriCANT’s. Video Poker, Caribbean Stud, 4 card and Crazy Poker hijack the game into unrelated territory of luck only. It doesn’t seem right, but NLH is as important cognitively as reading a book or operating a McDonald's cash register, Poker Genius is nothing more than constant attention. Everyone is a genius, it’s just that some of us are too stupid to realize it. It is easy to get de-geniused rapidly with all these house games.

Our national id may have ADD, our shared hallucination of “more” and “any place but here” having instead of being;but our poker idd needs DDD --- deceive, delude and deny. We have to misrepresent or disown what we know to be true, we have to lie to our self, deceiving our self requires that we both know and not-know sometimes. This apparent paradox is one of the keys to understanding how poker-DDD operates . The Self “Flim Flam” startegy. You have just lost $500 in a big hand---Nothing changed except the meaning we associate with our response - and hence everything changes. That's reframing! It's the art of choosing what to give greatest significance to in any situation. It is the art actively choosing our response. It means we do not engage in regretting or resenting.

There’s a yang for every yin. Attention is the strongest currency at your disposal. It’s poker capital. Every moment of our game is of infinite worth in that it has the potential for movement. There is Infinite input at the table. NLH has more to do with a state of mind than the cards.

Broadcasting poker let the genie out of the bottle. Thanks to WSOP and WPT enslaving the masses just became easier. It is like randomly mailing automatic rifles to 50 million addresses. This time, You hope some crazy twenty- something trench coat mafia types gets a hold of one, with their fine unwashed arrogance steps into a casino, and go postal as their longest journey begins with cash advance from Bank of America. Fasten your seat belts. There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result. How was the poker game ?" is like saying, "How was that drive-by shooting?" You don't care how it was - you're lucky to get out alive. Iit’s much easier to SHOOT a bullet than to DODGE a bullet (a If I had three thumbs, I'd put them all up There is absolutely no substitute for a genuine lack of preparation. You need chaos in your soul to play well, and a unit of chaos is called a cao. Playing against these fish is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope . It’s called Texas Holdem not Texas sharpshooting---the guy who shoots holes in the side of a barn and then draws a bull's-eye around the bullet holes.

22. Today Is A Good Day For Someone Else To Die!

Most Players simply do not know how to behave in a massacre. Poker weakness is pitied, but jealosy, that’s gotta be earned. If you’re not pissing somebody off at the table, you’re not doing your job. A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a battle of wills and add drama to an otherwise dull flop. If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you. If you really make them think, they'll hate you. Hate the game not the playah. Get mad at the situation not the playah. Don’t take it personal.

23. Money Costs Too Much

Poker acts. You react. The Cards alway have the first move. Playahs are really living in a state of not knowing. So, you need a Scenerio It might take 15 years to become an “overnight Success” or it might take one tournament. Inspiration, however, is wonderful when it happens, but you have to develop an approach, for the rest of the time. The wait is simply too long. You can just Fake it till you make it. Money costs too much. The road to better play is whatever road you're on and it helps to have a scenario. My overnight success took 10 years-- People tend to overestimate what can be done in one years worth of poker and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years. Failure is not an option in poker. There are only outcomes. It’s like one long day. It’s never a single, cataclysmic event. You don't fail overnight .Instead, failure is a few errors in judgement, repeated every day on the felt. NLH’s has this eternal present feel to it.

Create your own system, or be enslaved by another player’s.Check it out--- When you're in a hand against one or more opponents, put them on something. Make your best guess about their holdings in light of their betting. Have a keen sense for the obvious because it is easy get so caught up in our own hands that you don't stop to consider what your frenemies are up to until it's too late. If you have a scenario, you may be wrong but at least you have a chance to be right, and have something left. Count your outs—How many cards can improve your hand.

In Baseball time is measured only in outs. Knowing your “outs” or the cards that will potentially give you a winning hand is the most important aspects of playing winning poker. The amount of outs you have should dictate every move you make when faced with the decision to fold or to continue playing a hand. In a way you spell success in poker T.I.M.E. Infinite patience brings immediate results.

The world needs more of ME---Your education is an STD, It makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you have the urge to pass it on. Every playah has a number: the exact change you need in the bank to walk away. You know that you can lose your job at any moment, that his madness takes its toll on your mind and body and soul, and that the job prepares you to do nothing else. Your career becomes a race to squirrel away a bundle. There is no equivalent to the gold watch, just--a double lobotomy and ten rolls of rubber wallpaper.

24. There’s nothing ethical about the “work ethic” in poker.

That rule that everything worthwhile is a result of struggle is not only false. There’s a bit of larceny in getting more for less, a bit of cheating the “system”. You feel like some black market wheeler-dealer., living in the underground economy of CASH.

A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation. $100 bucks makes you the corporation . This ain’t no Google this ain’t no Buffetology. There's nothing better to change your moral outlook quicker than cash in large sums.

25. Few things are harder to put up with than a good example

If it wasn't for pimps, prostitutes, hustlers, gangsters there wouldn't be any poker. There was a time when one could almost be afraid to call himself a playah because it meant so much kneecapping. The assumption that gambling is bad has outlived its usefulness.Now anyone can do it with complete ease, because it means nothing at all, thanks to the CNN effect of dealing with everywhere and everything at once, including the WPT and WSOP. When you start to read about the evils of NLH, you have to give up only one thing--- reading.

26.Law of Large Numbers

The future is already here it’s just not evenly distributed yet. How do you predict the future? You create it buy sitting at a table with the wallet bearing crowd and exploit their affliction, the “house money effect”. The future you see is the future you get.

The law of truly large numbers says that with a large enough people playing many odd coincidences are likely to happen. The one chance in a million will undoubtely occur.

27. It Ain’t Awful Play, It’s Lawful.

Everyone profession has a blind spot. Players have a mindset, just as lawyers, accountants, bankers, engineers, and scientists have their specific mindsets. He wants to win money, but ends up losing, that’s a problem. These unwanted problems aren’t the problems----they’re attempted solutions. Every behavior has a positive intention.

The lawfulness of poker players behavior. Somebody’s gotta be a sheriff The herd is usually wrong. They don’t play aweful, they play lawfully. They are predictable. They act in certain ways. They act in a cause and effect way. They “take In” the game.

All Phish are made from the same mold, some are moldier than the rest-the sponge pants Bob, the Fred the funnel, Steve the sieve, Sam the strainer. Bob absorbs all! Fred puts the fun in funnel. He’s here to have a good time. The chips pour in at one end and they spill out the other. The strainer lets the juice pass through and is stuck with the pulp. The sieve is the best because it lets out the flour dust and keeps the fine powder.

The so called new ways to play holdem are the old ways heated up in a microwave for 15 seconds. The Playah is devoid of trvia, the structure of one's own skills are frequently invisable to himself. Teach an old dogma new tricks-You never hear of a dog that is failure at being a dog. If yourgame is not broke break it before some one else does.

28. The Second Coming

Going For Broke makes you Broken- Having lost everything, the Playah feels that he has found himself, that he has been re-born, that he has been charged with natal energy, able to take on new challenges and to explore new territories.

Think in opposites---Advocating for the Devil’s Advocate

Symptom Prescription-The Cure Is In The Poison.

Do the unwanted habit of folding instead of raising. The cure is in the poison. As long as you’re wanting to change, you won’t. Trying to hard worsens problems, Don’t just schedule in some me time, schedule some worry time. Some forced catastrophes. The blow up method, blown out of proportion. It is important to do what you don't know how to do. your poker skills keep you from learning what is deepest and most mysterious. If you know how to focus, unfocus. If your tendency is to make sense out of chaos, start chaos.

Paradoxical intention: All In with 74 Off Suit. Bluff off all your chips. Do what you (love) fear and the money will follow.

The world of either or is a world of false dilemma. There is a third option. The world of “and”. It is the difference between a breakdown and a breakthrough. The Pro’s of con ---Confidence and contradiction. to reach beyond what appears to be obvious. Reaching beyond the obvious is the essence of getting creative with NLH..

The statue is not the saint, the menu not the meal, but the map is the territory. out there' in the cards—Go within or go without, without an understanding of players..The poker world isn’t user friendly it’s user illusionary a blur of energies and frequencies. We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea is but one channel from many extracted out of the supermix The Phish is the last one to know it is in this mix.

Sorry we’re open 24 hours a day---like some vast and unimaginable mall, opening her legs to receive us all screaming out, “I’m for sale” I 'm at a seedy Indian Casino in Ft Lauderdale, where I think everyone goes eventually, if they die without Christ. I start to take up second hand smoking, .have a beer, what the hay, it’s only liquid bread. The Brain is like an appendix for these dunces, they don’t even use it. All right, brain, I don't like you and you don't like me—so let's just do this and I'll get back to killing you with beer. Work is the curse of the drinking classes. A bunch of underdogs in this inhumane society. These are working class people. You can’t lie to them. You can never offend them in small ways. It’s all or nothing . I am allergic to civilization. It makes me wake up with headaches. I need to go back into the casino with all these zombies. Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength, and most of these New York transplants wear rudness as a a fashion statement.

29..A rainbow of chaos

A chao (pronounced "cow") is a single unit of chaos...We have , chaoboys and chaogirls. The wrecking ball swings, out of chaos order, and order chaos. There is order in apparent randomness. Perspective is the key to perceiving order. Crisis is not merely a mindless jiggling, it’s a subtle form of order. Reign Chaos Cow/girls/boys..

30 NLH is a sport like bald is a hair color

Holdem is too random to be left up to chance.

You would rather be skillful than lucky anyway--Sure anyone any ONE TIME gets lucky 100% of the time. The law of large numbers says that you will win the lottery. Ask yourself this question before sitting down to play poker: Lucky or skillfull?

"Whether my decision is good or bad depends on how I make it, not on the outcome."

The Secret is about the law of attraction and results—the secret of poker is the complete opposite! And opposites attract!
The way to get better is to think about process not results—focus on better decision making and ignoring short term results.

Analysis Is Paralysis

Poker Bloggers are the sharpshooters that come down from the hill after the battle to shoot the wounded, in this case, the dead. I'll give it my best shot.

There is never a certain prescribed way to play a hand, just a way to think about them. There's the expected result, based on analysis, and the actual result, based on events.

David Sklansky's Fundamental Theory of Poker is a theory which is not about poker. Instead it is a theory about the results of poker. In other words, you cannot use the Fundamental Theorem of Poker to solve any actual poker problems. It’s good for finding out whether I was lucky enough or not to be holding any two cards against an opponent. That theory is outlined early in his book:

"Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponents' cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played it if you could see all their cards, they lose. Conversely, every time opponents play their hands differently from the way they would have if they could see all your cards, you gain; and every time they play their hands the same way they would have played if they could see all your cards, you lose." [17-18]

POKER: It is not about winning or losing, rather excelling: Because of the huge amount of luck associated with NLH, We often face uncertainty in making decisions, we can, therefore, make a good decision and get a bad outcome. (Bad beats are had more often by GOOD players than bad. Afterall, you are "getting your money in good"...only to get that suckout miracle card ruin your nut flush to a staight flush etc.) Good decisions in poker, therefore, will not guarantee good outcomes, but on average, consistently better decisions lead to consistently better outcomes.

1.Secrets to Beating America's 92 Million Irrational Poker Players

Common sense is not so common, and these common flaws are often consistent, predictable, and can be exploited for profit.

Illusion of control - the tendency for players to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes which they clearly cannot. NLH is 100% luck and 100% chance. An opponent can (suck out) win one hand 100% of the time. NLH is too random to be left up to chance-yet good results will have you rejecting alternative ways to play--Nothing fails like success. Doing things right the first time is an obscenity--If your game isn't broke, don't just break it, break it before the competition does.

Loss aversion - The pain of chips lost generally is much greater than the pleasure of a chips gained. Playars strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains ( Quit early when winning and playing marathon sessions when stuck or chasing---see also sunk cost effects. To win money over the long haul, you’ve got to win big pots. And to win big pots, you can’t be held back by this thinking error. You can't play a safe tight- is -right solid game and expect to win. You can't avoid crisis, you must be in a perpetual one that you create...but selectively picking your spots).

Bias blind spot - The left side of the brain will do the math. But the right side will "tag" it with a story. That story usually doesn't compensate for one’s own cognitive biases.

Choice-supportive bias - It's called "anchoring" remember one’s choices as better than they actually were. (Using the past to predict the future). There is never a certain prescribed way to play a hand, just a way to think about them. I've had racks of chips only to be felted 14 hours later because instead of an attitude of gratitude, I had the Mick Jaggar Tumbling Dice "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing"soundtrack playing.

Endowment effect - When I own something, I will tend to value it more highly. If I have to sell it, I will probably want to ask more than it is really worth. (Not being able to let go of QQ,AA,KK---rookie moves, and over betting the pot) There's the expected result, based on analysis, and the actual result, based on events. Poker is a game of situations---I've learned to thrown away Kings, Queens, and with a four card flush on the board, even two red Aces!

Confirmation bias - The Indians Rain Dance worked because they never stopped dancing! The Jeane Dixon effect-of making a few right predictions, and overlooking the false ones. Searching for information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions. The delusions of reference--tells, lucky charms, hunches and coincidences.

Bandwagon effect - Do things because smart money people do or believe the same, like playing Helmeuth starting hands, or walking the painted line of Sklansky's Theory of Poker or Doyle's Super System. Related to groupthink, herd behaviour. That's what I find so cool about my game--being able to fire three barrels with squadush. (Thank you Poker Stars Sit and Go's)

Déformation professionnelle - the tendency to look at things according to the conventions of one’s own T.O.E., time on earth; assuming things that have similar traits are likely to be identical; forgetting any broader point of view. Past experience and feedback loops can make you Hola Lupe.

Disconfirmation bias -. We tend to use the information that is most handy when we make decisions/predictions. The path of least resistence mashed up with thin slicing.

Focusing effect - prediction bias occurring when players place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.

Hyperbolic discounting - the tendency for players to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, the closer to the present both payoffs are.

Impact bias -Our minds are suited for solving problems related to our survival, rather than being optimised for poker decisions. Players overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.

Information bias - Seeking TMI, too much information, even when it cannot affect action. Try playing in the dark, or blind---With less information to be processed and filtered, the brain assigns higher priority to the information that it does receive.

Neglect of probability - the tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty. Expected Value and Variance---weighing all the possible outcomes, weighting the more likely outcomes, and coming to a conclusion---play a big part in the decision process. There is therefore, never a certain prescribed way to play a hand, just a way to think about them

Mere exposure effect - the tendency for players to express undue liking for things merely because they are familiar with them. If it's not broke, break it!

Omission bias - The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions).

Outcome bias - the tendency to judge things on their outcome, and not on their process. Over weighing and overeacting to a bad beat-- the most recent information or circumstances.

Planning fallacy - the tendency to underestimate task-completion times. It has taken me ten years to become an overnight Holdem success!

Post-purchase rationalization - the tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was a good value.

Pseudocertainty effect - the tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.

Selective perception - the tendency for expectations to affect perception. (Gamblers Fallacy)

Status quo bias - the tendency for players to like things to stay relatively the same.

Von Restorff effect - Purple Cows and items that “stands out like a sore thumb” have a tendency to be more likely to be remembered than other items.

Zero-risk bias - preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.

32.Egonomics 101---Overconfidence, Myopia and Hubris

The power of mind over money is rooted in mental bias . It is our own idiosyncratic way to distort our map of reality. Just as the menu is not the meal, this map is not the territory--because everyone experiences gambling differently. When your reality check bounces---change your map.

FLOUNDERS verses ROUNDERS -The difference in playing with the belief and intention of winning against just being social.

For the poker Balla, nothing is better than when that average Joe Player sits down at a poker table. Why? Because he just sat down with money he INTENDS to lose! There is no more +EV situation, and most tables in a live poker room are filled with players exactly like that. When you treat No Limit Hold em as only a game of chance instead of skill, it is not a law of probability, it's a fact for games with negative expectations: Risk of ruin is 100%.

A Joe plays when he "feels" like it, a Pro, all the time! Call them perpetual shortcuts JOES make when losing poker ASAP; and as any of the PROS will tell you, they don't need cards to win--that's for amateurs. Pro Players specialize in other people's biases! especially that malignant optimistic one that beats its chest and says, "I'm the best player at the table". Hotel Anyware considers himself an average player, except for the fact that he considers himself an average player!

Pros know the 60/40 end of a proposition--- when to hold em and when to fold em--- when you have some competitive advantage over somebody else. And you don't bet, you don't gamble, you don't invest, unless you have some competitive advantage.

Poker is a game of partial information, and when you have a competitive advantage you have to take into account this and, more important, behavioral factors. There is wise.... and there is otherwise:

Behavior Has Consequences

Irrational default modes of playing tend to show up in our game both when we win---the House Money Effect chip overload of playing loose with their money, and when we are getting on tilt with bad beats: That's when emotion and even confidence cloud our judgment and misguide our actions. The Volatility and Variance of NLH rewards patience, a clear mind, and, selective aggression.

American Airlines AA and the Concorde Effect—A True Story at the $100 Buy-In Bicycle Casino- Eating Dessert First.

I’m UTG, deep stacked with four limpers. I raise and get called by all four. I should muck right there but I don't. I’ve got pocket aces. The flop is low ball 3 4 7 rainbow. I bet big-a Dan Harrington "information" bet to see where I am at... and lose three players. The turn is a 5, a possible straight. I bet bi

g again and get re-raised all in. I insta-call. The river is a blank. I flip over AA and Lift Ticket has Pocket 66. for the nuts.

The very next hand I get pocket kings--it was Dijon Vu, the same old mustard--My emotional return on investment however, my EROI, was saying "SEAT OPEN!" and the table could smell it and I got everyone calling, a family pot. I actually wanted to go home broke..and even though I tripped up, I lost to runner, runner, heart flush. I did. That's right,wanting to lose money. And that emotional return was more of a payoff than the financial one--when my black Kings got cracked by suited connectors (hearts, a baby flush!).

Granted, too much respect for money makes you a bad NLH player but I walked away from that session with knowledge: First, that my brain is the "most powerful computer." Second, when on tilt, my brain is the most powerful "broken computer ."

Tilt makes us sub-optimal for evaluating rewards, sizing up risks and calculating probabilities. It's like selling the car for gas money.

I walked away with a less broken computer, less sabotaging behavior, and more insight into the fact that self-delusion is more than possible in poker - it's highly likely!

Behavioral Finance ---The Black Box Flight Recorder has a name for my crash landing -- The Sunk Cost Fallacy --the refusal to get out of a losing position, because you've already written the money off -- resulting in losing even more money.

The British and French governments continued to fund the Concorde project long after it was determined that it was a loser---merely to justify past investment in it, rather than assessing the current rationality of investing.

You have an over pair on the flop and bet big. You get called. On the turn the texture of the board is dangerous. You bet out in the dark---suddenly you are stuck as your opponent straightens out.

We are in fact more sensitive to decreases in our chip count than we are to increases in them.

Doyle Brunson, a member of the MENSA Poker Club says: Great players lay down great hands. In fact, the ability to accept a loss and get away from a great hand is probably the most important (and difficult) skill to learn in poker. It's the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

The ability to take a small loss to avoid a big one is the hallmark of this poker genius.We all start out as geniuses, and then allow our emotions to de-genius us. If you put good players into bad situations they usually turn bad.

33. Choosing Preferences over Outcomes
It's not success or failure only outcomes.It's not about winning or losing, but exceling and making good decisions in spite of the outcome! ER

Poker is, first and foremost, a game of managing resources, or if non are available, being resourceful. You can explain anything with preferences- For example “I always play 7 deuce unsuited”. It’s The Hammer. 7-2 off suit is considered the worst hand in Texas Hold'em. ... Because it is the worst, some players will play it for fun, and will continue to keep betting, even if they expect to lose This .Belief perseverance-that you can spike that one out, and get lucky is every where in Poker, the seductive NOW moment in the the game. It's becoming a routine observation.

This malignant optimism can create the happy accident-- you can get lucky 100% of the time....on any one hand.

This is a predictable surprise in holdem, the cost of doing "Business" are chips, and BAD BEATS are the overhead!

34. Playing holdem without a helmet
This is one of the secrets to Beating America's 92 Million Irrational Poker Players:Most players are experience rich and technique poor. They most likely are gambling not betting. This is your demographic of"overconfidence", of magical thinking,Every Americon Gambler is only a hand away from a very humbling wake-up call.

Most people will choose preferences over outcomes. like playing Russian roulette and saying to yourself "You have a 5/6 chance of surviving. People sometimes select the choice they put less monetary value on. That is why calling to the river is a way of folding. The Cult of the amateur has drunk the kool-aid. The close choice of say, a heavy metal fan of Metalica verses Mozart Effect. The glass is not half full, it’s not big enough for gamblers. If you swim in the river, you drown in the river. Things don't even out with time, they even out with the number of hands you play against "fish" PS Don't tap the Aquarium, you'll scare the fish.Every hand of poker is a series of risk/reward decisions. America's 92 Million Irrational Poker Players cannot always figure out what is in their best interest.

Money and risk are abstract, complex things. We act less rationally, less logically, and more emotionally when playing cards. When your left brain gets good at telling your right brain what to do, you even the score, and gain a competitive advantage.

35.The universal tell in poker is called betting!

No limit holdem is a game of ins and outs, need and speed, aggravation and acceleration.

Counting your outs, the number of cards that will make you a complete hand is something to reconsider, thanks to what I call, the Bluff Outs:additional scare cards that, if they hit, you bet out, and, force your opponent to fold; mentally dealing them the hand .Bluff Outs Poker is about playing 'in the dark': betting that your opponents DON'T have the cards rather than that they do.

Preflop, a pocket pair only has 2 outs to improve, overcards have 6 to draw to the nuts.This is not even taking into account straight and flush draws! That means over cards are at least a 3:1 favorite to improve and win the hand. And with bluff outs, even if you miss, you can bet it like you have it.

It requires a shift in thinking---Instead of "I hope he doesn't bet" or " Come on--- pair the board" or "Club, Club Club" ...that's wasted energy...Say to yourself, "If a club comes on the river, I am betting out like I have it, enough to take your opponent off their hand of top pair, even trips! or " If I hit my set, I am betting the pot". or If I miss with AK, I am making a big cointinuation bet, no matter what"....I've done it. It works.

Betting verses Gambling

Full Catastrophe Poker is not a game of cards played with money—It is a game of money played with cards. It speaks a language called betting, is a slang that rolls up its sleeves, spits in the street, screams strength possibly more than any other and gets the work done. Tells Don’t Tell – People Do with the language of their betting. Poker is a game of partial information and the language of betting "last in" is information dominance.

Bluffing is a big part of NLH since most players miss the flop 33% of the time.IN NLH there are 4 opportunities to bluff, 1 pre and 3 post flop. LOOSE players are looking for reasons to CALL; TIGHT, to FOLD.

You aren't a bad poker player if you get caught bluffing sometimes or most of the time. You only have to win a fraction of the time to net a profit. Sklansky's (game)Theory of poker points out that you cannot play optimally unless you include bluffing into your game.

Every bet or raise can be a bluff, and you can beat a bluff with a mediocre hand. The only way to compensate for the bluffs of your opponents is to bluff them back!

You don' t get what you deserve in poker, you get what you negotiate--Bluffing is the quintessential Negotiator. If you are going to be a winning player, you have to include bluffing in your game.
The more your bluffs matters, the harder they are to pull off because they are, after all, bluffs. It is, however, impossible to defend against a solid bluffing strategy. Reality is perception, and appearance reality.

Tells can give you a competitive advatage. HINTS or suggestions are better ways to describe the leaks in opponents (and your) game.-The universal hint in poker is called betting—jamming the pot when you have the best of it, and punishing opponents for their draws.Betting is the language of poker; the more money behind your bet, the louder your voice! This kind of game is The safe sex of poker-without the deceit, the seduction, the bluffing-is like wearing a condom. And you know how that feels.

The sex of poker is bluffing, getting something for nothing-Poker is, after all, anything you can get away with. In the real world, If your wife is cheating on you---you don't want to believe it.(Truth bias). So she bluffs you and gets away with it but then...one day her own Fear of being caught---detection apprehension---will be the non verbal (TELL) communication that speaks to your subconscious and allows you to divorce her! That is, if your left brain gets good at telling your right brain what to do.

Misleading Vividness-Learn The Lines
Bluffing is giving yourself permission to win, even if you do not have the best of it. When you show up to a game, you have to be script driven, and the lines are simple--I am going to win, NOT I should win , NOT I deserve to win. If you can pull off a feeling of acceptance, not even belief, you will have a reasonable amount of success in your bluffs. Be misleading not confusing in your bluffs.

Use position, psychology and bluffing to tip the scales. One thing for sure-POSITION makes every bluff easier. What is your RRR, your risk reward ratio? What are the CP's, calling patterns of your opponents? What are their BP's, betting patterns? The bluffing quest is in these questions.

You don't get a second chance to make a first impression on any given hand. Commit to a hand, and the prosperous termination of desired events--scooping up the pot. Bluffing really means I am against something but appear to be for it. Creating a false impression, disguising the "truth" is easier said than done. Overcompensating in either direction usually occurs---that's a bad bluff. Manipulating how confident you appear, a person who is bluffing will almost always overcompensate 100%, to convince or convey.

36.The possibility of sudden significant change in your game.
The Secret is about the law of attraction and results—the secret of poker is the complete opposite!

The way to get better is to think about process not results—focus on better decision making and ignoring short term results. This is extremely hard to do because neurons that wire together fire together--- that's the sex of poker ---Having fun. In fact, it's not about winning or losing any one hand, but excelling and having an "experience"

There's a wonderful phrase in Gladwell's Blink--"the power of thin slicing"--which says that as human beings we are capable of making sense of situations based on the thinnest slice of experience. That's what I mean about the difference between having fun and "having an experience"---pure house games like black jack and slots, verses poker. NLH is not just a "sport", it's a concussion. The difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

Hello, My Name is--"I'm All In"-when bad things happen to good decisions.

Bad playing (Making the right mistake) can get "rewarded" 100% of the time on ANY one hand.This kind of poker---PUSH and PRAY-- is not a user friendly game, rather a user illusionaryone because : "Lucky" players will always have worse cards then you, and will draw out, even if there is one card in the deck they need, and they may very well get it.

Getting your money in good, only to get sucked out is a fact of NLH. Chips are overhead, bad beats the cost of doing business against random reDONKulous decisions.

For these types of absolute novice, everything is even money. The idea is to defeat that concept, making, for instance, balanced decisions---correlating the size of the pot to the strength of your hand.

Nevertheless, when you treat No Limit Holdem as a game of chance instead of skill, it is not a law of probability, it's a fact for games with the "F" fun factor-- you may have great expectations , but you will get negative ones. Risk of ruin is 100%! That's the difference between gambling and betting.

Losing holdem ASAP is about that default lottery- Ka-ching- DONKey mentality of wish fulfillment.It is a portable magic---you rent but never own. Take it to your game and you will leave through the revolving door of poker on the old gambling world of luck's PUSH, verses the New wor(l)d order of NLH's PULL. It's rolling the DICE verses Inviting CHOICE.

37. Teach Yourself Poker in 10 Years ---Why is everybody in such a rush!

Learn to play poker like the Pros….and go broke. If you play like Gus (Hansen), you will..TVEPP TV Educated Poker Players-see:The MoneyMaker Effect.

It's closing time for the karaoke crowd, the old dogs of kitsch. Who actually cares that you can

belt out,after three martini's , the loudest My Way: AK all in pre flop is still drawing hand! --It's still the S.O.S. Same ole ___ bland copies of the original AKA Doyle's by/buy-the-book, Super System; or Sklansky's Theory Of Poker --Don’t bring math to the game, bring strategy.

NLH is too random to be left up to chance. NLH is senseless, common sense and it’s not so common. It’s crazy delicious! The fixed is replaced by an obsession with the here and now, The Power Of New. It's less about how do I play 3 3 in early position and more about how should I think about it. There is no there there! in the distilled experience of the veterans.

Old wine in a new bottle is when you play ABC "I bought the book" holdem. "Money runs counterclockwise...You always lose money from the guy on your left and win chips from the guy on your right" or " Seat 9 only value bets here and only bluffs there."

The quest is not in these Either/or questions:---Am I gonna win this hand or lose it? Is my hand better or worse than my opponents single hand? Will I play it as a stealing hand or a hitting hand? Either/OR even in terms of thinking Pre/Post flop. .This duality of up and down, playing optimally verses exploitively -- There is no right and wrong, good and bad. odds and even. Zero Sum Minus Some, is too pedestrian, too run-of-the-mill. It's more than mixing it up and shifting gears---the mess is the message.

You can't predict the flop, but you can invent it--Plan around commitment.

It’s hard to think probability. Info is Lost In Translation when we simplify yet the simpliest concepts in NLH are the most powerful. There are no best starting hands, only situations. Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler. Think of it as a continuum, "AND". An infinite number of third options. This concept needs to be in your game.

Doing two things at the same time that apparently negate each other. NLH is 100% skill and 100% luck. The language of "and" is the language of NLH. The language of "and" is the language of passive and active, optimystical and materialistic, hard and soft. There’s a yang for every yin. It’s Fuzzy logic, and everything is a matter of degree and the player is fuzzy wuzzy to the nth degree. Get a clear, sharp view of the fuzzy.

E= MC2 Equity= More Chips Squared.

Equity—think in terms of what is my hypothetical share in this pot, not just “Am I ahead or behind”.

Commitment- Plan around it. Where is your equity coming from: Making the best hand by hitting or stealing it post flop.—to win the pot, but every hand has the potential for both. Most battles are won before they are fought. Consider the range of hands as well as the playah's temperament.

NLH revolves around the threat of an all in bet. It should be considered around ever decision. This may come at you. Play differently in big pots...Isolate hands that have a high showdown value, and overlimp in hands that have a positive and implied odds to invite more people into the pot. If practice makes perfect, and nobody's perfect, then why practice? There is absolutely no substitute in NLH than for a genuine lack of preparation.

A NLH session is one long conversation run by C students, and Cash is their report card. NLH is like high school with money. This is a world beyond the classroom besides getting the correct answer. The important thing, nevertheless, is not to be in the know, but to be in the Power of NEW . The glass ain’t half empty, it ain’t half full, the glass is not big enough.

What everyone knows about poker is not worth knowing. Challenge the Myths of One-Liner NLH Formulas-Think long think wrong. Dump it or pump it. Suited and booted. Tight is right. All in to Win. No set, no bet. Go big or go home. Raise more than call and fold more than raise.

I wrote The Power Of Paradoxical Thinking in High Stakes Poker This draws water from that wellspring-- Procrastinate now! Infinite patience does brings immediate results to your game. When was the last time you said "I think I'll go to the casino and fold 80% of my hands!"

In Poker the future is already here. It’s just not yet evenly distributed yet. You see, Poker is really a game of mistakes. The rules of Americon Poker are designed to achieve an important balance: an unskilled player(usually the guy with the three c’s condo, cash and cars) must be able to win just enough hands to keep him at the table losing his money. The Americon just look for opportunities, not guarantees. He is ready to make the right mistakes.

Come sideways at an issue instead of head on -It's Not the Big that Eat the Small...It's the Fast that Eat the Slow . Slowplaying fast...

Don’t ca-cheng unless you ca-ch’i--Physical energy capacity is measured in terms of quantity---low to high; and emotional capacity in quality ---negative to positive.. It’s energy, not time, that's your street cred, your table image.

Managing energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of NLH. You can be motivated to play holdem that's good. You can be inspired to play holdem, that's great. Good, however, is the enemy of great.

Remember what Michael said in Godfather 1, "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer"---Stay motivated, but recognize those moments of inspiration.

Everyone is a genius, it’s just that some of us are too stupid to realize it. It is easy to get de-geniused rapidly with a attitude of " I just want to have fun". Walking into a game because you "feel" lucky is like walking into a sports bar because you "feel" athletic.

Denial just ain’t a river in Vegas. If you want to plug some of the leaks in your game, as Einstein said, "You can't alter a condition with the same mind set that created it in the first place" ---The power of NEW is the power of thinking without thinking, and knowing without knowing.

You don't get a second chance to make a first impression--Logic should yield to instinct. Rebuys are just rearranging the deck chairs of the titanic. The iceberg image, unless you realize something else is keeping the guy afloat who just took all your money , you are destined to become a human hangover, obscene and heard screaming "I'm king of the world! The Emperor's new t-shirt says" But they were suited"...Check please.

The Power of NEW-Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, verses The Power of NOW--Staying in the Moment is poker mastery.

There are four basic stages that a player must pass through to achieve poker mastery:

1. Beginner's Passion"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's there are few." Shunryu Suzuki

2. The Student Emerges"He is now forced to admit that he is at the mercy of everyone who is stronger, more nimble and more practiced than he." Eugen Herrigel

3. Expert Level is Achieved"He who has a hundred miles to walk should reckon ninety as half the journey" Japanese Proverb

4. Poker, One Hand at a Time
"If one really wishes to be master of an art, technical knowledge of it is not enough. One has to transcend technique so that the art

becomes an 'artless art' growing out of the Unconscious" Daisetz T. Suzuki

"When the teacher is ready the student appears...

Thursday, May 30, 2019

The Sex Of Poker-The New Poker Lobotomy

First you do it for Fun, Next you do it for Money, Then you do it for Love

The Sex of Poker...

Pain For Sale

The Power Of Impossible Thinking

2.Eating What You Kill Is So Money!

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