MVP:

Awesome! Thanks for the fill-in.


I'm startin' to get some of the real mojo kicked down to me now, y'all...Soon, "I will be the best online .05 / .10 full ring NLH player the world has ever seen." What the f*ck is up, brothers and sisters!

Stay tuned...Sklansky coming up.

HitmanXL

MVP:

Thanks...I'll definitely check them out...Sounds sweet.



Okay...The Theory Of Poker, by David Sklansky. I dig this book, though I don't pretend to fully understand it in practice yet. And that's my first point about the book: It is a dense, but extraordinary, poker textbook. Sklansky, himself, echoes this in his Preface to the book, where he states "It (ToP) is not an easy book, but a careful reading of it should reap rich rewards." This is my second time through ToP, and I'm already seeing / learning things I didn't on the first pass. Not that I scanned the book the first time...I even read the copyright information and the numbers above the barcode; I'm obsessive in that way...What I mean is that this book is so dense with useful, and profound, material that it deserves, and I think, requires multiple readings. Or, it could just be that I'm a moron...Check out my avatar...That's me working out a word problem ("If me, KennyG, and MVP are hangin' at the strip club, each of us with a couple hundred bucks, how many lap dances can we acquire in total?"). Actually, ToP made a lot of sense the first time I read it; it's just that I've gained a little more experience since the first time, and now I'm internalizing things that just "made sense" when I first read them. One can't learn what one is not ready to learn, I guess. With greater experience, I'm certain ToP would, and will, be even more valuable. For these reasons, I will return to it again and again.

I would, ultimately, like to be a fully improvisational poker player rather than a player working from a system or play book. I would like to be as flexible, adaptive, and imrovisational as a poker player as I am a driver in my car. It's a cheesy analogy, I know, but check it...When you're driving a car, do you say to yourself, "I'm not going to stop for any yellow lights," or "I'm always going to round the corner without stopping at Stop signs," or "I'm going to go 10 m.p.h. over the speed limit," etc.? You probably don't say these things to yourself, but you may do one or more of these things out of habit, and that's okay because, in your car, you will adapt to the always new circumstances of your environment. For example, you may be the kind of driver who, as a rule, doesn't come to a full stop at a 4-way Stop sign. How many times, however, are you forced to break this rule in order to adapt to the circumstances of the road (i.e. a pedestrian in the street, etc.)? Quite a bit, I imagine. So, playing a poker "system" is similar to these kinds of driving "rules" in that a play, or prescribed manner of playing, may be effective most of the time, but, when it's not, you may end up roadkill.

Now, I'm not saying systems or playbooks are bad; in fact, I'm saying they are good in that I think they can help a player become functional more quickly than a text like ToP. What I am saying is that I want to be the kind of player who, at least, recognizes when one of my "system" rules is not appropriate and chooses another course of action. I would eventually like to become the kind of poker player who, moment by moment, recognizes and evaluates all of the circumstances at the table before making each poker decision. That's what I mean by being a fully improvisational player. Of the poker books I have read (not many, admittedly), ToP seem to be most in line with this notion. Of course, being a fully improvisational player is gonna take a lot of work, study, and experience, but I like throwing it up there as the virtuoso stage of poker playing...A goal worth shooting for.

More from ToP as we go along.

Next topic: Should the Hitman adopt Excession's starting hand chart, shown in his "Newbies Guide To Online Poker," or an even tighter one (details of Ex.'s chart will be shown in the next post)?