Happy Birthday to……….me

Today is my birthday……..and I am still sad enough to be here writing this blog. Actually me and my partner have a few things planned this evening and over the weekend. Didnt play any poker at all yesterday but plan to play later on today.

Just chilled out yesterday watching back to back football matches on ITV4 in the UEFA Cup. Man City are capable of coming back from 3-1 down at home but they are so leaky at the back that you have to fancy Hamburg to score at Eastlands.

I have had a few e-mails of encouragement about the NL50 Pro Poker Challenge which has been nice. Todays session will be interesting to see if I can replicate the success of wednesdays session around the blinds. Had an e-mail from a guy who said that sacrificing EV is blatantly wrong whichever way you look at it. I didnt answer him direct so I will do so here. Let us take an all too common scenario. We will invent two poker players who are both playing NL50…….Bob and Ken.

Bob is a very strong player and multi-tables NL50 games, he maximises EV by understanding ranges and can ascertain this opppoents range quite well. He has to put his money into the middle in numerous situations where he is only a marginal favourite. He makes $3000 a month and his biggest downswing has been 25 buy-ins which is $1250…….he is more than happy taking those losses.

Ken on the other hand has exactly the same level of knowledge as Bob and skill. But his outlook to money is different and he lacks Bob’s all round experience of variance. Very early in Ken’s “career” he encounters that same 25 buy-in downswing (because he is playing identically to Bob) and that loss of $1250 came at a stage where he was yet to prove himself at that level and as a winner on the whole.

He felt this loss so severely that it actually put him off playing poker full-stop. In trying to match what Bob did, he started to doubt everything about what he was doing when he started losing. By trying to make $3000 a month like Bob he ended up with a loss and packed the game in. Ken had a different mindset to Bob and needed to approach the game differently.

By using a lower variance system, Ken could have perhaps made a comfortable $1500-$2000 a month and be safe in the knowledge that he could have made this money safely without hiccup. The lesson here is that EV isnt the be all and end all in poker. Sometimes you need to sacrifice EV because in doing so you are reducing variance. Strong minded successful players dont need to do this and EV is everything to them and this was why the reader probably failed to appreciate what I was aiming to do and who my target audience are.

I have said it before recently and I will say it again……variance is iike speed…….it kills (especially the inexperienced)……..see you soon

CAKE POKER………..THE SITE THAT HAS ONE OF THE BEST RAKE DEALS ON THE NET AND THE SITE THAT DOES NOT ALLOW TRACKING SOFTWARE.

The Dean is sponsored by Cake Poker and can also be contacted at Carl@Pokerquest.f9.co.uk for coaching, mentor schemes and all other poker and gambling related matters.