I'm Feeling Much Better

It took me a long time to recover from my illness.  I got better day by day and I would say I'm about  90% back.  I didn't leave the house for several days. I didn't let it stop me from playing online, but I did have to cut back my hours and get some extra sleep.

The first half of April has been eventful.

My son and his family came back from Germany and we took a 300-mile round trip ride to bring them back from the airport.

Someone was shot and killed about 100 feet from our house. Our neighborhood is always, well, interesting, but we haven't had any serious problems on our block, no doubt partly due to a law enforcement presence in the area.  My next door neighbor is a captain in the sheriffs department and for several years, when my wife was the neighborhood president, our community police officer was a regular visitor.

Two poker-realted items:

1. I'm up $12 for the month playing $1 SNGs.  I should be able to play better and more often now that I'm feeling better, and grind my bankroll up a little faster.

2. I'm planning to play a live tournament this weekend, and I've been working on memorizing the top 20% of hands so that I can get used to increasing the number of hands in my opening range in that tournament.  I open between 10% and 15% of my hands in live tournaments, and since most of the pros open with around 20% it's time for me to get comfortable doing that.

I was surprised that A4s (ace-four suited) was in that range.  I'm uncomfortable playing hands with weak kickers--but when I thought about it, A4s being in top 20% made perfect sense.  Not only could the ace take down a hand by itself, but it's also a hand that can make a lot of very big hands like ace-high straights and flushes.  I play a lot of speculative hands when effective stacks are large, so that hand should most definitely be in my range.

I find myself doing this a lot as I work to improve at poker.  One of my strengths is that I'm honest with myself about when I'm good at something and when I'm not.  When I identify a weakness I often find that bring structure to the issue will force me out of a my comfort zone and help me turn that weakness into a strength.

I never run out of things to work on, in fact, the number of things I have to do to improve my play somethings seems overwhelming.  But in my plodding, one-small-step at a time learning style, I eventually it.done.  The elephant in the room that I will have to deal with soon is bluffing.  I have no feel for it at all.

I've taken some small steps, such as opening with a lot more suited connectors as semibluffs--but there is a lot more to be done.  Fortunately, as with any aspect of poker, there is a lot of study material available.  Many poker books discuss certain spots or conditions that are good for bluffling.  The math nerds are on the job, talking about game theory concepts like Optimal Bluffing Freqeuncy.

For anyone who wants to get better, the information is out there.  I just have to take advantage of it.