By
grapsfan |
Published
Dec 28 2008, 03:14 PM
A .300 batting average means you have failed 70% of the time. Yet, most Major League hitters have a better success rate than people who post on a message board seeking advice. In general, there are some very simple guidelines that forum posters can follow to greatly increase their chances of receiving a relevant response from their colleagues in the Poker Discussion forum. These simple rules offer both sides of the give/take equation a greater likelihood of a more rewarding experience for everyone.
If you’re posting a hand to ask a question or solicit advice:
- Don’t ask for “pros” or “top players” to help in the title of your thread. Not only does this technique NOT help, it alienates others who will have perfectly legitimate, if not better, answers to your question. Honestly, a high-stakes pro will often have a less valuable answer to your micro-stakes question than a fellow micro-stakes player.
- Be accurate in your title. Give the kind of game (cash, SNG, MTT) and stakes.
- Avoid any descriptive adjectives or phrases, especially negatives, about anyone else in the hand. If you start with “man, can you believe how bad this donkey played it?” you’re not truthfully asking a question. You’re looking for someone to validate your skills and make you feel better about what happened as a result of your rotten luck. For your convenience, PocketFives offers a Bad Beats forum, full of people willing to help you in this particular quest.
- Take 30 seconds and edit the hand history to remove the results. Get to the part where you have a question…and cut out the rest. You will get far more objective advice if you remove the ending. Taking the time to format the hand history correctly will also show you’re serious about discussing the situation.
- If someone responds by telling you how bad you played, don’t argue. If you can construct a follow-up question in a rational, unemotional voice, feel free to do so. But understand that poker strategy is often very subjective and there will inevitably be people who agree or disagree with analysis of a certain hand.
If you’re posting a response to answer the question or provide an opinion:
- Provide some detail. Just saying “fold pre-flop” does no good whatsoever if you don’t say why. The person with the question doesn’t learn anything, and you look like you are not interested in taking a minute out of your busy schedule to help. If you can’t or won’t add anything more than one sentence, save the keystrokes and don’t respond at all.
- Negativity has to be about the play, not the player. If you don’t like something about how the hand was played, it’s important to say so. Sugarcoating how bad someone played only provides them an excuse to hide from the truth in your words. But there’s a huge difference between “I hate how you played the turn” and “that’s terrible” or some personal attack.
- If you don’t regularly play as high-stakes as the hand in question, consider this when responding. Opponents have different general tendencies depending on a wide range of factors, including stakes. A $5 grinder may not yet understand the level of thinking, table dynamics and player history in the Stars $100 rebuy or deep in a Major. Any correctness in your “advice” would strictly be coincidental.
- Redundancy is OK, but you should do your best to add a new spin or opinion. If three other people have previously said the poster should have called a shove rather than folding, being the fourth voice provides some extra justification to the correctness of the play. If you can also come up with another sentence or two with another reason as to why, so much the better.
- Do your best not to appear like a “fan boy” when a top-ranked player or other board “celebrity” responds. You can agree with how SCTrojans or Annette_15 may have played the hand, but responding with just a quote of their post, or the “^^^^” symbol so prevalent in recent message board history, is counter-productive. Find a way to expand upon a specific point of theirs.
We’re all here to improve. We all like talking about the best way to play. Thoughtful, courteous and focused discussion will strongly increase how much fun we have, and how much we all get out of the online poker learning process.
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