About This Blog

As I play the 500nl Zoom games, I occasionally get a flash of inspiration that allows me to win a pot that, under normal circumstances, should not be 'mine'. Indeed, I actually rely on these flashes of inspiration quite a lot. In order for it to happen, I need to be playing in 'The Zone', which is a basically description of being fully confident, refreshed, relaxed, and thus able to play poker in a super sick manner.

In the past 3 months, since going on an anxiety drug called Citalopram, this zone has become more of a habit and my results have been very good. When in the zone, I have a feeling of complete control over the table, and feel myself able to completely overrun it. This is partly a feature of the 500nl Zoom games, which are insanely nitty in many respects, but the player pool is still obviously skilled enough such that it's not enough to simply go bet bet bet a lot. When in the zone, I find myself picking up on vast imbalances in timing, sizing, and then obviously the manner in which the hand has been played- turn stabs weakening the checking range, etc.

From my experience of playing in the zone, I am strongly of the opinion that there still exists infinite room for pure exploitation of these imbalances. Sure, people drop out the games complaining it's 'solved' (lol), but all that has actually occured is that the super duper obvious imbalances have largely been shored up, and the players who quit haven't been good or wise or patient or confident enough to advance their game to the next level. In a lot of spots, people have cured one imbalance, and simply created a new one elsewhere. An example is the propensity to check back weak and middling top pairs- great, you can't get stabbed into on the turn as much, but you're giving free cards and now you're much more open to flop check raises. What's more, you're still susceptible to turn and river overbets.

(
While sorta on this subject, I want to stress a really crucial point, and that is the players who can still beat midstakes+, have gotten too wise to share their important secrets on training videos. They won't misplay hands or anything, but they'll gloss over super important concepts and over-stress the unimportant. Watching them, sure you might pick up the odd thing, but the main goal of watching them should be to work out how to destroy what we are seeing in the videos, because this is how the population at large is now playing and is going to play.

So stop watching them to try and copy their style, in the current poker environment we need to come up with our own ideas and concepts.
)

So I digress...... in the past week or so I ran out of Citalopram, I basically forgot to order more. This has meant I've been less relaxed at the tables, and my higher level brain functions are finding it much harder to constantly re-invent solutions in complicated spots.

It's made me realise just how little I have learned to unconscious competence, in particular the art of winning pots. (Lucikly I still have playing the nuts down to a tee, sicko that I am).

This art, of being super high intensity, is particulary important in Zoom and especially at 500nl, because as I already mentioned the population at large is ripe for exploitation in this manner. Or put another way, there is zero edge in 'out-showdowing' people at 500nl. Also, counter-intuitively playing in this manner is the only way to get regs to loosen up and call you down once in a while.

So, this is going to be a study blog, with CREVs and stats and things, and focus exclusively on the lost art of playing like a maniac and printing money in doing so. I'm sharing it only with very few trusted players, so please don't share it if I have linked you to it.

Enjoy!