Ed’s Spring Poker Thoughts
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Here are some quick thoughts for this warm Spring morning.
- There’s a lot of money to be made on the river in the $1-$2 6-max no-limit games on Full Tilt. A lot of the regulars miss value bets a lot, and they fold too many hands to overbet shoves even if you aren’t really representing anything too plausible. So you can get a pretty good edge on them by value betting well and choosing your spots where they have a weak range to shove. To some extent the folding to shoves is an ok adjustment for the games because most of the players aren’t overbet shoving often enough as a bluff.
- I’ve installed the PokerTracker 3 Beta and have been using it. The HUD’s a little buggy, but the new features are really nice. The preflop 3-bet and fold to 3-bet stats in particular are immensely useful. It’s a lot easier to choose good spots to 3-bet and 4-bet light when you have those stats in the HUD. For some reason a lot of the 19/16-type regulars’ names run together in my head, and I had trouble remembering which ones liked to 3-bet light and which ones didn’t. The 3-bet stats make it a lot easier to remember.
- Stoxpoker has a new PLO coach, Ribbo, and his videos have inspired me to try to pick up the game. For the last week or so I’ve been playing in the $0.50-$1 6-max games on Full Tilt. I don’t know what a lot of the betting patterns mean, so I’ve gotten a little lost a few times. But it’s pretty clear that many of the other players (particularly at night) are really pretty terrible. For example, it’s common to see tables with 55% VPIPs. I don’t know much about PLO, but I know that can’t be right.
So even though I suck I still feel kind of comfortable in the games. I can only imagine how juicy the games must be for someone who knows what they’re doing. If you’re a Stoxpoker member and have any interest in PLO, I definitely recommend checking out Ribbo’s videos. - Oh, and don’t go too crazy with stone bluffs in those $0.50-$1 PLO games. It turns out that it’s actually pretty easy to make one pair when you start with four cards. And one pair is coincidentally some players’ requirements for stacking off.
- Apparently Leatherass pees in a bottle while he’s playing. I’m at a loss for words.
- If you’ve been living under a rock, you won’t know yet that the WSOP main event final table will be played in November, four months after the rest of the tournament. Interesting. When I heard, my mind immediately went to all the new and tempting ways the final table players could make secret deals, collude, and otherwise screw each other over. Then Elaine asked, “What if one of them dies in the interim?” An interesting question. Knowing poker players, the other final table contestants would naturally demand that the deceased be blinded off. Presumably this gimmick will help revive some new interest in TV poker. Honestly, I don’t care much either way because the chance that I’ll be at this year’s WSOP main event final table is zero. It’s hard for me to get too bent out of shape about tournament machinations. But if in some alternate universe I were to happen to be at that table… methinks it could be a really weird four months.
- Despite the final table shenanigans I’m definitely looking forward to the WSOP this year. I plan to play the cash games and have a lot of fun.
Tags: 1-2-no-limit, final table, full tilt, HUD, Leatherass, no-limit-holdem, overbet bluff, peeing in a bottle, PLO, poker, pokertracker, Ribbo, stoxpoker, value betting, world-series-of-poker, wsop
What if some less scrupulous person or organization decides to place a big bet on the short-stacked, unknown, underdog to win and then calls up the well-known, large-stacked, pro instructing him to lose or something bad will happen to his mother?
Bad people can demonstrate some clever thinking to get their hands on much less money than what might potentially be at stake here.