Someone asked this question on the forum,

"Excluding the donk-type freeroll players which you'd hardly find , isn't poker just a game of luck when everyone is playing just perfectly especially towards later stages of tournaments..I mean where's the edge coming from when everyone is playing just correctly?"

and I thought my responses could be of use to the community as a whole, so i am reposting them here.

Part 2

"Man you guys are jerks, 3 pages and nobody answers this poor guys question."

Are you kidding me? His question was answered several different times in this thread. Some people like to lead people to water, and then allow them figure out how to drink it..thats how they will maximize their potential...but since you want it spelled out, get your notepads ready.

The edge comes from reading your opponents, thier position and likely opening and reraising ranges, their bet sizes, their stack sizes, and assigning ranges based on that information. Most good players can do all of this.

The great players then get their edge from the following:

Level 1) assign players a range and see how your hand fares against it..then make a couple decisions about how to play your hand...this is the what do u think he has?

Level 2) take into consideration what your opponent is likely to think you have, and how that can adjust how you play your hand..this is the what does he think u have?

Level 3) ask yourself if your opponent is capable of giving false information (can he appear weak when he is strong? will he 4bet you light while appearing to be strong?, etc..and so forth..this is the what does he think u think he has?

Level 4) based on your answer in level 3, if he is capable, you may have to adjust your decisions in level 2. ie..AJ suited is probably a clear fold if you are 4bet by someone not capable, and a fold, call, or reshove if he is capable. Level 4 takes levels 1 thru 3 into account to decide on the most optimal play given all pieces of information.

Level 5) Perform levels 1-4 while also trying to think a street or two ahead of your opponent so you tell a cohesive story while exposing his. bet sizes, image, position, and action by street should all match without conflicting.

The best poker players are already thinking thru levels 1 thru 4 before they even get involved in the hand, they have a plan on how to respond to various actions preflop, and usually a plan on how to play the various streets. Mastery of the above thought process is where the edge comes from...and as such the best players will always be proactive in their thought processes while the good players will be reactive to your thought process.

Putting it all into practice. A good players thought process with AJ in late position late in a mtt might be the following:

I'm going to raise here in late position cuz i have AJ.

A better players prospective:

I'm going to raise here in late position with AJ. If the blinds shove, i'll prob call cuz AJ is pretty good and they can be shoving light.

A great players prospective:

I'm going to raise here in late position with AJ. If the cutoff 3 bets me, I will likely 4 bet him preflop as he has 3 bet the table several times last few orbits and i have been very active so my hand is underrepped from my position. If sb raises me, I will lean towards folding cuz he has only played two hands out of his last 75, but i may take a flop in position. If BB reshoves all in with his 15 bb stack, i will snap call as he has a reship stack and my previous notes on him states that he shoves reship stacks with a wide range.

However, if either the cutoff or bb just flats me, i will lean towards jamming the flop with the bb with regardless of flop, and vs. the cutoff i will need to look at flop texture before deciding on a course of action.

Then as the action unfolds, each assumption is revisiting and updated or changed based on the new information available and applying the level 1 to 4 thought processes on each street in the hand.

Any retard can shove KQ because he saw a training video saying that it was good to shove it from the BB (in that particular situation) when short. But understanding why the shove was good is the key link missing from the average players game...they just know that they've seen moorman or pik do it, so it must be the right play.

Class dismissed...

JD

Someone asked this question on the forum,

"Excluding the donk-type freeroll players which you'd hardly find , isn't poker just a game of luck when everyone is playing just perfectly especially towards later stages of tournaments..I mean where's the edge coming from when everyone is playing just correctly?"

and I thought my responses could be of use to the community as a whole, so i am reposting them here.

Part 1

Playing Perfect Poker doesn't exist. The whole basis of tournament poker is to make assumptions on image, opening, 3bet / 4 bet ranges, etc..etc...its all based on assumptions and how your hand fares against those assumptions. Every great player makes several mistakes daily, not taking the optimal line or making an incorrect assumption on an image or a range. end thread.

My personal opinion is that with all the internet training sites and forums, more people are not necessarily playing "perfect" poker, but instead, more people are playing the same type of poker. That can be a good or bad thing, depending on how you respond to it. If you don't adapt, it sucks as people are playing a style that increases your variance and puts you in more marginal situations as opposed to dominating ones. With that said, those that adapt and play a level above the rest will continue to crush. All the rages today (treating KQ like the nuts from late position, reshoving light just cuz you have a reshove stack, reshoving any two from the blinds) are not only exploitable, but extremely profitable to those that turn that shyt on its head.

three years ago, everyone played tight poker following standard opening rules and the rest played like retards. The players that realized that began to crush tournaments just by using uber aggression as they would be given way too much credit for their openings and reraises / reshoves. These players exploited the fact that most players played the same way.

Now everyone has been taught to overuse aggression, and its the same thing all over again. The best players will exploit the fact that most players while completely different players from say 2 or 3 years ago, they still play the same way as a collective group. Some fundamentals won't change...in the mtt world today, variance has increased and you will face more marginal situations than ever before. Most will be a slave to the process and attribute every deep run fail as bad luck with coinflips. A select few will adapt, embrace variance, and learn to love marginal situations if they include some sort of illusion of FE, and continue to crush.

While I am not a personal fan of the high variance style, I will also admit that it has never been easier to take 20-50bb's off of someone than it is in today's environment. Shyt...i've seen guys get in 200 bb's + with hands like AQ and 99....hands that noone would have dreamed playing for 30bb's just a couple years ago.

Cliff notes version:

If you think everyone is playing perfect poker, than you are the fish at the table

If you think all your non scores are attributable to losing all your coinflips, you are the fish at the table

Be an individual and not the group, adapt to the group, exploit the group, and own the group....all the meanwhile selling additional services to the community like access to your website or replays of your sunday major win so you can make even more money off the group while you help to define their style of their play even more while you continue to refine and adapt your play to exploit theirs. all the meanwhile, they are thanking you in comments on your training site for helping improve their play as they sign up for another 6 month subscription and begin playing above their roll due to a newfound false confidence dumping even more dead money into the higher stake buyins. Yup..the door behind the door in poker is dark and ugly. And we haven't even begun to talk about backing, poor bankroll management, MA'ing, soft play, "pros" that go busto several times a year, etc..etc...

Now that i think about it..just hang it up now kid...you'll save yourself a lot of time and anguish.

JD

Short cliff notes version:

Started playing poker casually in 2004. Started on espn.com when they had a free poker applet and since i wanted to bet on sports, i eventually landed on bodog.

The players there were pretty bad and i made decent money. built up a roll of under 100 bux to like 4k, and then was able to sustain it from there, withdrawing money from time to time.

Started out playing 5 dollar sng's, but was soon up to the 55 and 100 dollar sngs...

Was still playing casually up to 2007 when I finally decided to jump to greener pastures and i moved on to fulltilt.

Started with a small roll in feb 07 and played real low..like 5 and 8 dollar sngs. Took me about 5 months to finally build it up to a few k when i binked an 8k score taking 16th in the monthly million on fulltilt in september of 07.

Tried to immediately get rich and started playing all the big tournaments on fulltilt..including the 100r. what a tool i was then to think i could just jump right in into hsmtt's, but thats what i did.

funny thing was, for 4 months straight, i was cashing enough between mtt's and sng's to keep my roll going and even w/d along the way. Then i hit a 2-3 week rough patch and essentially blew thru my roll. Decided i needed to take some time off and stopped playing much around december 07.

Truth be told i was burning the candle at both ends. I was working as a business consultant traveling 40+ weeks out of the year, and after working a 9-10 hour day, i would go back to my hotel room and then try to play another 7-8 hours online, then grab 5-6 hours of sleep only to do it all over again.

Most of my work was in the banking industry and as much as i loved poker, i also loved my job. i was good at it, i got to travel, and i made a ton of money for my age.

but as the banking shyt hit the fan in 08, so did my dream job. I survived 4 rounds of pink slips, but on the 5th round, my name came up. I simply made too much money so my time came.

I had always wanted to see what might come out of poker if i took it seriously, so i decided now was the time. I began cautiously in mid to late 08, having to slowly build my roll since i was using my severance money to pay the rent and to build my roll. Took me about 6 long months to finally build a roll big enough to attack sng's and mtt's the way I wanted too. By august of 08, i was ready to attack...then the worst happened.

I went on the worst sng downswing of my life over 2-3 months and between taking out money to pay bills and the downswing itself, my roll was severly damaged....Once again, i began to question if this was really for me...but i stuck with it and began to slowly build the roll again.

By jan of 09, I had the roll I needed again and set about attacking the game like I never had before. Since then, things have been working out for me. 5 of my last 6 months have been profitable, including february where I just blazed all month long.

I finally took my first decent break in may and took a 2 1/2 week trip around europe with the g/f to give me a break and allow me to come back refreshed.

In two weeks, I will be heading to vegas for at least 3-5 weeks. I am going to be playing some of the wsop events this year as well as playing cash games and smaller tourney's in between. See, i always understood that if you want to play for a living and you don't go on a serious heater, then poker is a grind.

I have embraced that fact, and will play sng's, sat's, mtt's, or cash..whatever is needed to keep my roll going and the bills paid...the feeling is that you may run bad in one, but across all of them, a good player should be able to eek out a profit.

So..here i am. Finally with the bankroll that allows me to freely play most of the big tournaments online w/o worrying too much (although i couldn't take a several week dryspell), and finally able to take some real shots in vegas. I have big expectations for this vegas trip and it will really dictate the rest of the year for me. If it goes bad, i will have to come back home and grind sng's for hours and hours a day (not something i look forward too)...but if it goes good, I can come back and take time off, or attack the big majors, or w/e.

In any event, I hope not to be unknown by the end of the year, as i have aspirations of blowing up before then.

stay tuned as i take you on my tourney...blow up or roll blow up?

JD