“Poker is, more than any other game, an arena where experience counts. Reading and studying, while valuable, can only carry you so far. To go the rest of the distance, you have to play, play, and then play some more, until your instincts are as finely honed as your logic.” – Dan Harrington from “Harrington on Hold’em” Volume 2.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about where I want to go as a poker player over the next year. Should I concentrate on a particular type of game or should I branch out more, with the inherent risk that I just become a weak jack of all trades? I’m actually very conscious of not becoming one of these people who only ever plays hold’em, particularly no-limit. I tell people I love playing poker, so I think that brings with it a certain responsibility to be an all-rounder if at all possible. The key to doing that though is to know when you should begin learning the other games so that you don’t spread yourself too thin. I feel as if I can afford to do that now.
Above all, I like to think of poker as a kind of continuum and I’m playing my part in that continuum by participating in as many forms of the game as I can, which means that I’ve played a miniscule part in helping poker survive after I’m gone. I found it tremendously disappointing to read a recent interview with Antonio Esfandiari where he said that he only plays no-limit hold’em because he finds other games (especially limit hold’em) “boring”. That doesn’t sound like a man who loves the game to me, although I’m sure he’s in the minority when it comes to the big name players in that respect.
If you’ve read
my rationale for the name of this site, you’ll know that it quotes zen writer Philip Toshio Sudo and the idea of the “beginner’s mind”, and how you should try to “set aside all knowledge and preconceptions and open your mind to learning as though for the first time”. For me, that means not being too proud to learn a new game from scratch, accepting the fact that I am a complete beginner, and not skipping the basics because I think I know better. So in keeping with this spirit, (and as an attempt to put a little bit of my money where my mouth is) I’m challenging myself to start playing in the HORSE tournaments at Full Tilt by March 1st (co-incidently St David’s Day!). Okay, so I could begin playing them tonight because the buy-ins start at just $5, but why give money away when I don’t have enough experience at the other games. Right now, I’m exactly the type of player that I’d like to be up against if I was a half-decent all-rounder – someone who tries too hard in the hold’em hands in order to compensate for my lack of experience in the other hands. The other rule in this challenge is that before I start playing the HORSE tournaments I want to have at least ten hours of recorded playing time under my belt for each game. Most of that will also be played at Full Tilt too. I’ve studied and played a little bit of Omaha 8 and Stud, but haven’t played Razz or Stud 8 at all. If anyone reading this has any advice (including books, websites, personal experience, etc) then please let me know, because I haven’t found a great deal out there beyond the obvious books. Certainly Super System 2 is going to help me a lot, as well as Ray Zee’s “High-Low-Split Poker”. I’m particularly keen to find some stuff on Razz, otherwise I’m going to have to rely on Phil Hellmuth’s Razz chapter in “Play Poker Like the Pros” and I think we all know that that could end in tears.
Ultimately, I think that those of us who would like to see an end to the strangehold that hold’em has over the poker world at the moment ought to support any kind of mixed game that we can afford (or just play anything other than hold’em) whenever a particular card room offers it, so that these games continue to survive and flourish.
Despite my personal HORSE challenge, that doesn’t mean I can slack off on the limit hold’em though. I’m still heavily engrossed in bridging the gap between my Lee Jones beginner knowledge and the next step – the “Small Stakes” Ed Miller kind of player that I want to be. I’m looking to make a big push up the limits this year and the only way to do that is to play a lot of hands and to play them well. Which brings me to the Dan Harrington quote at the top of the page. While I was checking some stats in Poker Tracker over Christmas, I realised that I’d played far fewer hands than I thought I had. And I mean a lot fewer – something like half of the amount I thought I’d played. I could come up with excuses – too much time messing around in MTTs, my addiction to futile freerolls, or desperately trying to cling to the life I still have away from the game – but it all comes down to not spending enough time playing. At the moment I feel as though my theoretical knowledge has outstripped my experience and I won’t be able to go much further unless I redress the balance significantly.
Then there’s that casino that opened near me last year that I’ve been meaning to join and play at. So it looks like being a busy year, which is great. I can’t wait!
