Poker Articles

By Fox

I was thinking tonight about how my talk with Beanie a few months ago is still teaching me things, and still improving my game. The guy has a really good handle on what needs to be done to win these days. I used to be a devotee of Cloutier and McEvoy's No-Limit & Pot-Limit Hold Em, and for a long time my buddy Hatfield and I referred to two different eras in our poker careers. Pre T.J. and Post T.J. The book improved our game so much that suddenly we were winning small buy in tournaments consistently and making it into the money a majority of the time.

While I still think NL&PL is a great book and required reading for any serious no limit player I no longer see it as the ultimate reference on the subject. As Beanie pointed out, the book is somewhat dated and written for a different structure and player base than we play with online. Beanie doesn't say it's a bad book, but he's right when he says that it isn't perfect, and it doesn't always apply these days.

"The Book" as we called it is nearly perfect for beating smaller buy in tournaments with huge fields online. Your opponents will be so bad and in such vast numbers that the very tight and very solid style put forth in the book will make you a ton of money. Unfortunately the game changes as you move up, and at the $100+9 and higher levels things are a bit different.

Without a huge advantage over legions of terrible opponents I needed to adjust my game a bit to deal with more advanced players. Believe it or not I needed to call more often when people bet into me, and play more pots. Not advice you will hear very often. Farther into the hand is when a gifted player has more of an advantage and that's when I have begun making more of my moves. I'm still pretty tight preflop, and I'll still put you all in before the flop if I think I can make you lay down a hand, but it's not my favorite move anymore.

Beanie really just pointed out a change in philosophy that was necessary at the higher levels and I ran with it. It's amazing what a small piece of insight from someone who has been there can do for us little guys...

This change in philosophy was also helped along by a really good article Annie Duke wrote about winning the WSOP Tournament of Champions. One of my favorite things about Annie's writing is how honest she is. She is quite willing to write about her mistakes or a bad mindset, and she is quick to give credit to her opponents as well. I haven't met her personally but it seems to me that the woman has a ton of class.

In the article Annie talked about how she was intimidated by such a strong field, and you can see why when you look at the lineup. Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, Johnny Chan, T.J. Cloutier, Daniel Negreanu, Phil Hellmuth, Greg Raymer, Phil Ivey, Annie and her brother Howard Lederer. She talks about how she was unsure how to deal with such a strong table and how the tournament would be a bit of a crapshoot because none of these players were likely to make any big mistakes.

She watched her brother Howard for some sort of clue as to how he was dealing with the situation and realized that he was putting people to the test preflop alot. She adopted the same strategy herself and ended up using it to win in what was probably the toughest single table tournament in history. Makes that time you sat down to try and win a TEC and saw SailorLobell and BBKings at your table seem pretty mild doesn't it?

You see players of this quality don't want to play all in preflop poker if they don't have to. They know that they just don't have that big an advantage preflop, and they are used to playing deeper into hands so that their skill can work and they can get their chips in when they have a bigger advantage. Being put to the test all in preflop isn't something these guys have to deal with very often and something they don't much like in a tournament situation.

This made me realize that if I want to play with these people some day, I need to be like them in this way. I need to get farther into hands, and give my skills a chance to work, and I need to play pots instead of being so tight aggressive that I almost never see a flop. Super tight worked great for $30 buy in multi's, but it was too easy to recognise in the higher stakes tourneys and the really good players had very little to fear from me.

Lately I am able to identify people who are in "T.J. mode" and abuse them. They fear me in fact, and that's a hell of a lot of fun. Thanks Beanie, thanks Annie, and thanks to T.J. for writing the book that took me so far in the first place. I haven't forgotten about ya T.J., I've just entered a new era. Oh and my results in the post Beanie and Annie era? Excellent.

By the way the only book I've seen that helps me with my new attitude is Harrington on Hold Em which I highly recommend if you want to play in the higher level tournaments.

Thanks for reading, I had no idea how long this blog was going to be when I started writing it. Thanks go out to those of you who have emailed me to tell me you enjoy reading the blog, I appreciate the support. Shoot me an email any time at pokerfox@hotmail.com.

See you at the final table,
Fox