The current first meaning is sexual.  In mining terms, it is a mine with large and easily found quantities of gold.  That can also translate to a happening in poker.  Josie asked who was the best player she knew.   That isn’t a simple or even a valid question.  Poker is full of the wrong questions.

The trick in poker is to find your glory hole.  Mojo has a great tournament example with his home casino.  The process can be simple but with varied difficulty and often transient.  The basic idea is to use the structure and population (quantity and quality) to configure an approach that provides a higher than normal return.   You establish a mental process and persistence that gives you less variance.  That is easy to say and harder to maintain.  But it is doable.

The better players — not best but better — can do this in a variety of higher risk games.   The rest of us need to seek the level where our success lies.   Repetition by population is the key with tournaments environments.   Notes (mining for those who chose) is the key with ring play.   Smaller sites are often the better choice with notes  and some tournament can work the idea best.

We all develop a mindset.  I play different from Josie.  I am closer in thought process to Mojo — at least when I engage my brain for the required term.  That isn’t saying one is superior.  It means their optimal situation is likely different.   Any can occasionally succeed in their less attractive environment.  But, fit is important as it eliminates a distraction.  What fit does is create comfortable shoes.  It lets us maintain easier/better focus.

The first time I found the brass ring was in a freeroll, of all places.   PokerRoom had three freerolls a day with deep pay of (early on) $3000 addons.    You needed player points to cash so it wasn’t the typical freeroll.   Later there was a rebuy on the TonyG site that I found easy to cash in and backed a friend who did even better.  There were others and the most recent was the Stud8B game at UB that I’ve written a lot about.

Who you are as a player determines your best chance situations.  That doesn’t easily simplify.  One of my strengths is a trapping game when the blinds are right.  In that I am looking for people willing to overplay hands.   To put it in concrete terms, Josie would be a target; Mojo would be a nemesis.  That doesn’t say one player is the better but that I think I have the right understanding of certain potentials that feed a perceived strength.

I also think I can change gears fairly well.  This serves better in some structures than other.  I played on UB far more than FT because of that.  It isn’t that one should play on my choice.  The idea is to find structure that fits.  If the difference doesn’t seem apparent, you need to really study the whys of your success.

Poker is fun to talk/argue.   Glory holes are seldom the topic or arrive with the right questions.  But, they are +EV when you understand who you are and your environment better than the next guy.  There are no best players as a given but almost all can find their better niche and enjoy a better return.

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In the not too bright category, I’ll try to come up with a poker post. Seeing I haven’t played in months, it going to be hard to promote my great skill and obvious genius. So, I’ll fall back to something you, they, everybody already know. But, hey, it is a poker post.

Quack-Quack is a pair of ducks the worst paired hand.  But it a slight favorite to take out the third best starting hand — AK.   In a ring game it is an interesting hand with interesting relating to both curse and joy.  It isn’t as good as, say, 44 — which can also be played in an ‘interesting’ manner by the jaded.  (Interesting but stupid is my top Google search connection thanks to Arte Johnson. And it may also apply to recent 44 activity.)

The thing about these hands, is if we look at every permutation/option/thought, we just exceeded the size of War and Peace.  So, lets stay with acceptable blog length and my limitations.

You are likely to make a set 8.5% of the time.  Those are roughly the odds of drawing on the turn to an inside straight.  The reason to ignore that is that it smack of an implied odds hand.  Implied odds smacks of genius coupled to getting to act like an idiot and succeeding.  So, you flop your set and the world is rosy.  That assumes an uncoordinated flop and there not being a better set in the hands of a fellow evil genius. (~100:1)

Implied odds hands that hit are golden.  Fuel55 (remember him?) knew that Presto was certainly that and made profit and a blog from the fact.  In ring games you need to make $8.5/$ profit but, more important, it is the stuff of big pot dreams.  That was Fuel55 point.  In tournament, the common knowledge is that implied odds are less a factor.  Another tome could discuss that.  It ain’t simple.  Ever.

What all this boils down to is level 2 thinking.  Along with Martha we all parrot, “That is a good thing.” and it often is.  Or odds go out the window and stacker becomes stackee. We do have a tendency to make more of our level II thinking than we should.  Level II often traps us into a path that is fought with traps.  We fail to adopt and then we parish.

All that has little to do with the topic beyond a very general discussion of a so-so hand that can be oh so sweet when we see a 22A flop.  We’ve the stuff of dreams and even rivered nightmares. Damn but I miss that. Never thought I’d say that in that context.

So there you have it.  I’ve come up with a poker post.  It broke no new ground.  You leave no wiser.  But, I managed a poker post  … so there!

Curse you SDNY and the graduate school of jurisprudence that spawned you.

P.S. To anyone who might go all-in with 80 BB and fail with such a hand, it isn’t that promoting the hand is bad.  That isn’t a failure.  Overbetting is.

ADDENDUM:

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You know the bit; king of the blind. I feel like that guy sometimes playing limit poker. Throughout life I wasn’t noted for my psychic abilities. I might be able to come up with two or three abilities. One of those might even avoid a wanted poster.

OK, the teaser paragraph is over. I’ve plugged the more line in above so you have to click through to get here. More is the little graphic that shows between these to paragraphs. I am back in the world of WordPress. It isn’t as easy to use in many respects but it avoid being a pure black box.

On to poker…limit poker. That lacks the class of Bond…James Bond. Limit was what I started off playing. It masquerades in many folks minds as the way to avoid losing a lot. Mis-perceptions abound among those playing limit it seems. Anyway, I put $200 on PokerRoom a long time ago and in a land far away. (Blog scrolls to distant perspective) The long ago part is obvious. The land far away was pre-UIGEA poker. That land is far from today. But, the play then and now isn’t very far apart.

Play is what I really want to talk about. There is a lot said about the quantity and style of fish/donkey/your-pejorative – then and now. Not much change that I can see. Play is or isn’t bad on the players part. Short term that has no impact. Whether it is what passes for their a-game or blind luck, few ends every session a loser. That isn’t affected by player ranking or relative skill. Long term is a different story.

I don’t play people and rank there skill. I’d like to but there are only a few that fit that bill. You need to see their result and action over weeks or months to get anything bankable. And, in that period, they aren’t static computer programs that don’t change. If Dun & Bradstreet screw up rating mortgages with paperwork out the wazoo available, my chance of rating players profitable is at best on par.

But, there is something that is obvious and available in rather short order. It is their tendency. Regardless of skill or short term success, tendency is the Achilles heel that 80% of players exhibit. Nowhere is that more obvious than playing limit. And none are immune to it. On my good days I’ll vary my play. When I slip to auto-pilot, and that is a constant risk playing limit, I join that 80%. I may vary the degree better than most; but, it will expose too much.

Here is a blog that summarizes what I’m trying to say in all this text. Marcel riled against the 20% of player and play penalty.

Some days we get better cards from the git-go. Others we suck out. Next time we are card dead and played the fool. Over time that averages out. We end up either beating the rake or not. Control of that is limited or non-existent. But tendencies make the difference between bigger gains and smaller loses.

I am consistently amazed by the amount of information on these tables. I can predict action by a player before his move far too often for his own good. Online play talks about gathering information like it is more difficult than live play. Live play does provide additions. But the guts of it glares at you on almost every table. That requires paying attention and avoiding the ABC approach. It isn’t the game a multi-tabling expert uses. They are seeking to smooth their variance. I like my approach better. It is very workable in all the options poker provides.

ADDENDUM:

When I get to improving this blog’s appearance is a guess. These days I’m more interested in the text than the medium. I worked with computers. This play with the new stuff doesn’t hold a lot of attraction. So, there are two copies of blog rolls and things missing or outside good design practices. Sorry about that but I’d rather play a bit of poker.

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