Anyway that has accelerated my plan to move up to $1/$2 since first prize was ~$1550, which is conveniently about the amount I wanted to make before moving up from 100NL. So 1/2 here I come, wish me luck. Best of luck to the three (?) remaining readers of this blog.

The most valuable thing about being coached by a better player is, strangely, developing confidence in your own abilities. While I assumed that he would drop bits of wisdom that would profoundly change my NL game, that wasn’t really how it worked. What helped me most was seeing that we were thinking about things pretty similarly most of the time, but that he was a bit better at reacting to gameflow and planning future actions. But it wasn’t as if he thought about poker completely differently. The same basic questions – should I bet here? what am I representing? what range do I put him on? – apply at every stake. It really is the same game even at 25/50, you just have to give your opponents much more credit for responding quickly to you.

From a purely entertainment perspective, it was interesting to watch him play against some of the mid-stakes heroes like nanonoko. A lot of these players play a fairly straightforward game but play almost tiltless poker that makes it very hard to win big pots off of them except in cooler situations. I was surprised to find that the big winners were not playing a particularly unusual style – the stats and post-flop game seemed pretty standard. I think I somehow expected they would wildly deviate from the norm in some area – preflop stats, c-betting, check-raising – but they are just a bit better at all areas of the game it seems.

Now, about coaching more generally. There has been a little furor on 2p2 lately where people have been questioning the value of poker coaching, and even suggesting that coaching is a bit of a scam. Given the extremely high cost of most poker coaching – I only play 1/2 NL and I would probably be looking at $150+/hour for a coach – I think it’s correct to be a little skeptical of how much value you can receive from coaching.

I would be willing to guess that a lot of the benefits ascribed to coaching are psychological. I used to tutor students in statistics, a subject many people feel uncomfortable in. Half of my job was just reassuring them that statistics was not an intentionally tricky, obscure field of study, and that most of the basic concepts were actually pretty simple. I communicated real information as well, but what a lot of people needed was reassurance that statistics could be understood by anyone (and it can be, you don’t even really need college-level math to understand the core concepts of statistics like the central limit theorem).

Because poker is so dependent on confidence, I think the value of being coached is just validation: having a better more successful player tell you you’re not crazy. Of course players learn new things as well – I saw the high stakes player make a river bluff-shove that I never would have considered but his reasoning made perfect sense given the board and opponent. But players get coached because poker is a lonely business and it helps to have someone on your side (even if you have to pay them to be there).

In other news, this site appears to be pretty dead. I’m the only person who has posted in the past three months and I’m thinking of just moving along and starting my own blog. I am a bit more tech-savvy than when I started here and feel a bit more comfortable with WordPress and hosting my own site. I appreciate the opportunity I was given here but it seems like pokersift.com is kind of closing up shop. Best to all of you and keep at it. – Adam

This is exactly the sort of book I’ve needed, for a number of reasons. First, the majority of my play is at small-stakes (mostly 100NL, sometimes higher) at the major sites like Pokerstars and Full Tilt. At those sites and stakes, there are a lot of regulars; not as many as at mid-stakes, but even 100NL is a level where the majority of players play somewhat frequently, have reasonable stats, and can read hands the tiniest bit. Unlike microstakes, the median player is not a 72/10 fish who just wants to limp-call every hand. There is a set arsenal of plays that most players are familiar with, the so-called “standard” lines that most TAGs learn from training sites or simply from trial-and-error.

Secondly, like many players I’ve had trouble moving past 1/2. I’d like to move up to midstakes but I find myself lacking the winrate at 1/2 to make a move up reasonable.

Finally, I’ve always been aware that there are spots where I’m missing good bluffing opportunities, but I’ve never been able to pinpoint those spots very clearly in my self-analysis. As a result my play is quite unbalanced, especially on later streets (e.g. if I’m betting/raising I have it WAY too often).

Enter the workbook. The format is short and quite direct: there is not a lot of philosophizing about poker, the content is much more applied and specific. The majority of the book deals with several dozen hand histories at 3/6 6max online games.

Interestingly the author takes the tack of always assuming the same opponent: a 22/17 TAG with reasonably high aggression factor. This works well, because usually this is the prototypical “regular” we are trying to exploit or get an edge on.

I gained two major insights from this book: first, that I (and most of my opponents) are playing too passively on too many rivers. Being in position on the river is such a powerful tool that simply checking back most hands and value betting some big hands is a tremendous waste of this advantage. A related point is that there are many situations where you have some kind of showdown/bluffcatcher hand, but raising or betting it may be far more +EV than simply pot controlling or checking it down.

Secondly, The Workbook helped me think much more deliberately about planning hands. Rather than just assessing what I have and what my opponent has, the focus turns to how the board will develop and what that will mean for your opponents’ hand range. Integrating your thinking across streets and planning specific actions for specific later-street cards is something I never managed very well, but this book has helped a lot in that area.

The single most insightful passage deals with a 3-bet pot in position heads up. There are two possible hands you are asked to consider, both of which have a four-flush on a low-card board (I’m not being too specific here because I assume the authors would prefer I not quote directly from the book). The book asks you how you play each hand, and my initial reasoning was exactly the opposite of what is should have been. There’s a uniquely embarrassing and simultaneously satisfying moment when you realize your thinking is fundamentally backward on an important point of hand-reading and equity, and this book would probably be worth its price for that insight alone. My initial thought – that the higher flush draw had more showdown value and therefore should be pot-controlled more – was upon further reflection actually an argument for putting far more money in on the flop. I apologize if this is vague, I’m trying to convey my thought process without the specifics of the hand which is a bit hard to achieve.

If you’re a live player I’m not sure how much sense this book will make, because the passivity of live poker makes a lot of these situations uncommon. Probably half of the scenarios in The Workbook deal with heads-up 3-bet pots with 100-150bb stacks and a fairly aggressive opponent. These situations occur constantly in online 6max games and make a huge impact on your winrate; in live games (which are rarely 6max anyway) these situations may come up once a day. Bear that in mind if you are a deep-stacked live player or someone used to very passive loose games with few heads-up pots.

“The Workbook” gets my recommendation as a worthy investment. There simply are very few books that deal exclusively with NL cash games; those that exist are either out-of-date (super-system), extremely expensive (most e-books written by online pros), or just incredibly low quality (yes, I’m looking at you “Killer Poker”). If you’re someone who understands the basic tenets of the online game – light 3-betting, squeezing, floating and – but lack the ability to move up in stakes, then this is the perfect tool at a very fair price ($99).

You can purchase “The Workbook” through DailyVariance publishing at this link: http://dailyvariance.com/the-workbook.html

It’s an e-book with Digital Rights Management that requires a special piece of software (Lock Lizard) to view the PDF file. I am not an affiliate for this book and receive no money from any sales.

Thanks again to Try and best of luck to everyone at the tables.

Tri is the author of two other well-regarded ebooks on poker strategy, “Let there be range!” and “The Pot Limit Omaha Book: Transitioning from NLHE to PLO.” Tri is a successful mid- and high-stakes player whose books are well received in the online poker community, garnering praise from forum readers and the coaches at major training sites.

The co-author of The Workbook is the well-known high-stakes player “Kingsofcards,” who has been involved in some of the 100K NL action on full tilt recently, including an extremely memorable hand against Antonius that lit the forums on fire.

As I consider myself the target market for this book – the small stakes online cash game player who understands the basics but has trouble moving up – I’m quite curious to see what’s included. I often feel like I’m missing good bluffing spots, especially on the river, so hopefully this book can provide some insight into mixing up my play more and putting my opponents in difficult spots.

Thanks again to Tri for providing the review copy. The review should be up in a week or two.

The one aspect of my play where I really need to calm down is aggression in the face of aggression. I don't believe you can beat a wild card LaGtard, by trying to unagressive him unless you have a read that he is bluffing. Needless to say going broke at this stage of the turbo is not great poker...especially with top pair alone. I think I'm improving my game because I've learned to play vs. certain styles vs. just playing my style.

I lost in 200th place in the nightly 3$ rebuy on stars, calling an allin shove by the chip leader with KK - he has A9. Needless to say he hit his A but I told a railbird, I can sleep if I go  broke with KK....I didn't sleep much.

Still I'll take the $50.00 bucks and continue my ascent up the tournament rankings. Currently at about a 95% ranking on OPR, my goal is to get to the top 1% of poker players...top 13,000 online.

It’s been a while – been following the posts of all of you and keeping track of the pokersift site. I’ve played quite a bit and continue my evolution as a poker player. For a while, I kept a decent run of SNG’s especially at the 18man Turbo level, slowly moving up in stakes from 1.75 to 3.25 to 6.50.

Unfortunately the 6.50s are a little more of a challenge and I was back down in roll…that’s when I had an amazing experience…one that has made a huge difference in my play. I continue to be a small stakes winning player, I knock off a regular 50-100$ a week grinding and playing a few satellite tournaments where it might cost me 15$ to get into a 55$ tournament….the good news is it keeps my roll honest…not to big to afford to play bigger games…just getting by.

So back to the “Huge” difference in my play. I always been a Harrington disciple, playing my cards first, stack second and opponent third. I don’t think that is really being a poker player, I didn’t splash around in a lot of pots, I preferred to play tight – aggressive poker..and the results were there but I never felt like I was good enough to win a poker tournament. Just another player…so then it happened.

I ran into an old buddy, we had known each other in a professional environment some time ago and we played poker once in a while with a group of about 15 players. For fun, we kept a list of rankings based on a few players opinions…I was mid pack – we ranked him dead last. Mostly in jest because he wasn’t that bad, but he had never won and talked like he knew it all – so sorry to say we had to mark him last. That was four years ago..and how times change.

We had lunch and it was interesting to say the least. We started talking about his new living arrangements..he has it pretty good…and then it came out….everyone (or at least my dream).

He ran into a  random guy at a golf tournament  – sort of a friend of a friend and low and behold – they become room mates. This “guy” ends up being on the road quite a bit and needs a house sitter – rent free – to walk his dogs. Why is he on the road quite a bit you ask – we’ll he plays poker – and not just anothe player – ranked by Bluff, Card Player and POY rankings in the top ten. Needless to day my buddy signs up – and becomes a disciple of sorts….and he’s results are incredible. Tournament wins, deep runs, some serious play. He is ranked 1000th in the Official Poker Rankings, which means he is profitable. Turns out his new room mate, just learned poker 2 years earlier, got hooked and go winning pretty quick. He quits his job and becomes a tournament grinder, and one of the world best. The story just kept coming and it was one of the most enjoyable lunches I have had. Imagine rooming with the world’s best online poker player and getting daily railing….man incredible.

It was an interesting poker dominated  lunch and after – I had the itch to play – so a few SNG’s to the good. The next day I began a two day run – dying to play a tournament after the lunch … I stepped up to a 5th in a 180 man SNG and then followed up with a final table at another…with a donk out shove vs.  a 4x button raise I shoved J9s in the big blind…I thought I had him on a steal, but the chip leader turned over QQ and I was done..oh well…made me realize that I wasn’t living with a poker pro..lol.

I know I  could of won both tournaments, but I was trying some new strategy thanks to my pal and his advisor….and I was thrilled with the results. It’s been a long time since I gone back to back in a 180 man tournament, and although the talent is not high, I consider it an accomplishment to get deep 2x straight.

Bottom line is I feel like the light has come on. Some key “small ball” tips to keep pots under control … let guys make mistakes against you etc. I’ve been calling a bit more in position, and learning to play better after the flop. I called a few “opponents” and learned to stay away from the sharks and prey on the fish.

Had some good results, I also have a few wilder swings playing, but live and learn. I thought I try a tournament.

The first tournament I entered …. my “new” goal is to accumulate early – so I was splashing in a lot of pots, the cool result is everyone thought I sucked. So they would call with middle pair, flush draws and weak holdings because my range was wide. I got paid off huge. Once I realized everyone thought I was a LAGtard, I switch back to being Dan Harrington, and my stack kept rising. Finally, I bust out in 300th or so with a top 50 stack, all in on a flush draw vs. the chip leader. I had AJh and the board was 10, 9, 4 two hearts…so I figured, he might have a piece and if I can win this all in – I’d be right up in the top 10 with a decent chance to win. I’m alright losing that hand, cause I learned a ton…my game has evolved.

I’ve been playing a lot recently – had some wild runs in the 3$ rebuy – at one point in the top 50 with about 1000 left only to bust out with back to back slaughters KK vs AA and QQ vs AA. It happens.

I’m still trying to learn to get away from losing hands, and to keep switching gears, but that lunch has had an effect on me.

I asked my pal to sweat me, and teach me – and I look forward to becoming a better player and hopefully winning a tournament at some point.

I’ll keep you updated.

Poker Co-Pilot is the first serious Mac competitor to Hold Em Manager and Pokertracker. It’s still in the early stages of development, but offers the potential of a fully comparable Mac tool, at a reasonable cost and with the minimalist Mac look that many people enjoy.

If you’re familiar with Mac Cocoa interface – the color schemes, design elements and overall look that characterize iTunes and a lot of other Mac applications – then Co-Pilot will be immediately familiar. It looks extremely “mac-like” and has a minimal, simple interface that makes setup and configuration quite easy and straightforward.

After taking a few minutes to arrange the details, I opened Pokerstars on a Mac to try things out. Everything ran smoothly; the HUD appeared right away, and as I opened more tables Co-Pilot did not seem to experience any problems.

One interesting feature of the HUD is that you have two options for display. The first is the usual method, overlaying the selected statistics on each player’s position on the table. The second is to display stats as bar graphs. This is actually quite an appealing presentation, because it makes fish and nits extremely noticeable. While you can misread HUD stats, mis-reading a bar graph is much more difficult, so I think this method of display could certainly catch on.

Closing the stars client and returning to the software, I was impressed with the analysis options. They were on par with the much more mature pieces of software. There is a hand replayer, a list of all your opponents, a tournament records, and graphs indicating session winnings, showdown winnings, and non-showdown winnings. For those of us convinced we always run bad, Co-Pilot does not have an all-in EV calculator that I could find.

Aesthetically Co-Pilot is wonderful, with a simple buttons and menu interface that is very hard to get lost in. The program uses the four-color deck as a default, which I really like, and the hand replayer is far more attractive than its competitors. Rather than tabs, there is a sidebar where you select your analysis; I far prefer this method to the other tracking programs, and it avoids you getting lost in tabs-within-tabs.

Still, there are several notable areas of improvement needed in Co-Pilot:

This is clearly the biggest need and the developer has stated publicly that he is working on it.  When I first imported my hand histories, I was puzzled to find myself running 55/46 at all tables.  It turns out I only had heads-up hands on my Mac, but the co-pilot still read my stats based on the whole database.  Since the norm for trackers is this session only and table specific stats, there is still room for improvement.

I can’t figure out how to describe this, but the HUD only appears on one table at a time, the active table ONLY.  As you switch from table-to-table, the HUD is activated.  This is a tremendous drawback when you play with tiled tables, as the HUD is dead on all of the inactive tables and it’s much harder to follow the action.

Co-Pilot choked on a few hundred thousand hands in my import folder. This may sound like a huge amount, but those of you who multi-table online know that you can easily play more than that in a few months if you’re really grinding. I’m not sure what the underlying database structure is (Postgre SQL? This is what PT and HEM use I think) but there seem to be a few bugs to work out here.

Hold Em Manager really pushed the envelope here, so that a huge variety of HUD stats like 3-bet, fold to 3-bet, fold BB to steal, c/r turn, etc are now considered essential for most players (in NL cash games at least). Right now Co-Pilot has only rudimentary HUD stats to choose from, though I’m confident this will develop rapidly in the future. For example, there is just an overall check-raise stat, but not street-specific stats.

In summary, Poker Co-Pilot is an excellent tool with a lot of potential.  Unfortunately online poker is so Windows-centric that breaking into the Mac software market is going to be difficult.  Given how many other pieces of poker software are developed only for Windows – autohotkey scripts,Tableninja, andxpadder for gamepads are a few that come to mind – it’s going to be a difficult sell to get people to do all of their poker computing on Mac. However, never underestimate the love of the Mac-users for a Mac-specific application, and this is a very good one indeed.

All that said, I do think a market exists for native Mac poker applications, and this is by far the best example of development in that area. If you play poker on a Mac and are looking for a native Mac experience without virtualization, you should absolutely try Co-Pilot. Anyway I would like to thank Steve for responding promptly and providing me the review copy of Co-Pilot, and I wish him the best with the development of this enterprise. 

Two of my San Diego poker buddies and I had a  great night up at the Bicycle Casino in LA this week.  My friend, Jake (who goes by chilidog on 2+2), finished 5th in the Legends of Poker plo tournament while Chris and I ran over the cash games.   We were playing 1/3 NL Omaha High only with a $80 buy in, which went up by $40 every time you rebought.  This is a very strange game to find in a casino, which meant that few of the people at the table knew how to play it well.   I invested that initial $80 in the game and left with $1480.

Chris and I won all our chips from the seat 1, who has his hand on his head in the photo.   Seat 1 won all the chips that he later gave to us from the guy with his hands covering his face.   Those two got it all in at least six times. Seat 1 was the best kind of maniac, and most of the time he got all his money in dark.  Not surprisingly seat 1 was behind in all of these face offs, but he somehow managed to suck out and win every single one against hands-covering-face guy.  This made Chris and me very happy because the more money Seat 1 had, the more money we would eventually be getting.  In one of these blind face offs, they had all their money in and Seat 1 revealed 2227 in his hand.   Then, we all cringed in disbelief as the dealer flashed a deuce in the window!  In another hand, Seat 1 got it all in with 3489 rainbow (after looking, lol) and the flop came 343.   Of course the guy with his hands on his face had big aces that time. Chris took the photo of them right after that hand happened.   Isn’t body language fascinating?

The table was so crazy that people were standing around watching our game, we had to call the floor over to get more all-in buttons, and there was constantly a chip runner exchanging racks of 1s that started taking over the table for 100s.  Dealers were talking to other tables about how insane our game was, which made the action junkies at other tables fill the empty seats in our game, even though most of them had never played Omaha before.  Some people just love action, I guess.   It was really a perfect storm sent from the Omaha Gods.  I just kept wishing I cold somehow triple the stakes of the game.  My husband and I have been trying to start a family for over a year now, and at one point I thought to myself, “That pot was huge!  I can buy like 4 viles of follistim with that!”  I bet I am the only poker player in the world who calculates pots in terms of fertility med costs.

I had a fan club of old Asian men standing behind me saying things like, “She super conservative, but she good!”   One guy asked me, “Want to be my daughter?”  Another didn’t understand him because of his thick accent and because he didn’t speak English all that well himself, and he said, “Ha!  He wants you to be his doctor!  I need doctor too!” Then he urgently shook my shoulders and said, “Doctor, I have empty pockets, please help!”

Jake came over to play after busting out of the tournament and quadrupled up in the first twenty minutes he was at the table.   We had such a great time.   It was one of the craziest/most fun nights of poker I have ever had in my life.  I left at 5 a.m. so that I would miss LA rush hour traffic on my drive back to San Diego, and I am still wondering how much I could have won if I stayed longer. Before this week, games that good only existed in my fantasies.

I never finished the WSOP posts. You can guess how it went. I lost… and lost… and lost again. It doesn’t matter what and how. One important moment was just the 2500$ 6max LHE Event, when I realized I was outclassed. The biggest soft spot I had in the 5 hours I was in, was a FTP pro. Lots of internet kids/posters I see at the nosebleed stakes all the time and whose game I respect so much playing the event, so at least it was cool to be playing in the same event as them, but otherwise I felt really blergh.

And that’s how I left Las Vegas, too. Sure, I exited the Ladies’ tourney on a kind of bad beat, but just the experience that I was just a small fish in this unkind industry that just grinds you up and spits you out like nothing.

I don’t care about the money. As soon as I got back to online, I started winning again. I grinded off a 200$ bonus at FTP and it’s so laughable that people think they can’t beat the low stakes. But it’s a grind… I wanna get those hands behind me, I wanna become that feared player, wanna play 50/100 online. Sigh, still stuck at 3/6-10/20. A lot of what Tommy Angelo said has been rummaging in my head, something to the tone of: you either don’t have the time or the money to become a professional poker player.

So jealous of those kids that found online poker when they were like 18 in 2003, I was only 6-7 years older, but in another country and had obligations already. The ramp up is always the most difficult. And then there’s that eternal: “The games are getting tougher!”. It has now taken me pretty much 2 years to get from .25/.50 to 5/T (on average stakes), so definitely doable, but I’m discouraged that it’s gonna take me AT LEAST the same amount of time to reach 30/60 and then it’s gonna be non-playing most of the time (waiting, game selecting, reviewing, watching vids, discussing). No meteoric rise here and I’m getting a bit impatient (which is stupid, I know).

I’ve done a little bit of coaching lately, I know I can grasp your style of play quickly and know at least how I would go about fixing some stuff. But I don’t have the time (there I go again)… So many cool ideas about poker, but can’t realize them…

I told a very good friend/colleague (not my best friend) about poker, how I wanted to play professionally. Big mistake! I think she looks at me now with a disdain (not good in a work environment). It’s amazing what non-poker players think of the game, it saddens me. Why does gambling have such a bad connotation come with it? Ok, don’t answer that one It’s just frustrating to talk to non-poker players about winning money at poker.

Well, at least the people closest to me, my husband, my daughter, my best friend, my mom understand me and what poker means to me.

I don’t know what to say. If you are playing above 2/4NL online or 10/20NL live or above 10/20 online or 40/80 Limit live. How did you get there? Was the journey long and grindful? Or easy peasy? When you did make the jump to pro? how? Ok, I need to actually work now (not poker).