Happy Holidays

Got up early this AM to knock out work related stuff, enough to call it a good half day at least. Now enjoying a quick cup of coffee and will write until the rest of the family is ready to head off to the in-laws for Christmas Eve. This is the big celebration for us...tomorrow will just be our family.

I'm Jewish, my wife is not. I'm still getting used to the big celebration my wife's family does...not sure if it's typical or not. The minimum is 8 in the youngest generation (my kids), 6 from the middle (me), and 3 from the oldest generation (Jennifer's parents). In past years, there have been some more thrown into the mix, but I think that's it this year. Doesn't seem like that many people, but the presents can't all fit around the tree, and pretty much take up half the living room. After dinner, it takes probably 10 minutes -- with all the kids doing it -- to get all the presents passed out, and then it's just a flurry of paper flying.

My family growing up made a very small deal of birthday and Chanukah presents, but it seemed fine to me. The over-the-top celebration seems a bit much to me, to be honest, but I try to embrace it, and of course the kids love it. Actually, all the guys would probably rather tone it down a bit, but all the wives love it, and we're not (brave? dumb? ballsy?) enough to change :P. I can't really complain, other than the bills...Jennifer does almost all the work.

I was able to play a little bit, I think pretty well. The month started on FT, then I moved to Stars for a change of pace. Been going pretty well on Stars, with one unfortunate blip. Made my target to jump to 100NL at Stars, and then had the one bad session so far, dropping 2.5 BI. My play was OK -- I made one pretty questionable call where all my instincts were telling me to fold, but my head talked me into making the hero call. I made one big triple-barrel bluff that was pretty spewy looking back on it, and I lost all 3 flips, but they were all good plays by my part (and my opponents). It was just unfortunate that it happened at 100NL. Dropped back down to 50 for the second session of the day, and ran it back up over my 100NL threshold, so I'll try again. Played pretty well at 50NL, but definitely ran well too. I got KK all in for 120BB versus a spaz, hit a K on the flop, and ended up cracking his aces. That accounted for all my profit at the second session. So, it does go well once in a while, after all.

After looking through my hands, I read through some blogs. A couple of them triggered some thoughts. Graham talked about the different way guys like Verneer approach the game, where they tailor who they play big pots with...same hand, same board, different commitment according to players. I think in my game, I am a little too much one-size-fits-all. I will make some opponent-specific adjustments for things like who to 3-bet light (or whose 3-bets to call), whether or not to c-bet, whether to bet for value or induce a bluff, etc. That's a good start, but I don't think enough in general terms about an overall plan/philosophy for a given opponent. The lack of a big picture, while potentially not hurting me that much at the lower levels, is definitely something that I need to shore up because it's a gap in how to approach the game.

Speaking of Verneer, in one of his blog entries, he interviewed Dice. One of the things Dice mentioned is being at the appropriate mental level for your game. It does you no good to think at Level 2 if your opponents are thinking on Level 0. In other words, you need to give your opponents the right level of credit in order to play optimally. I definitely don't do that. I either give them full credit or no credit. Also, related, Dice advised to not overthink. I played a couple hands where these got me recently.

One of them, I was in a 3-way pot with an overpair to a 55x flop against 2 medium stacks. I'd isolated one of them, and the 2nd one was in the BB. The BB played very much like he had a 5. I was thinking that a 5 is such a small part of his range that I really discounted it, in spite of what his postflop action was saying. At the time, it really bugged me that he showed down that 5 and I lost a half stack. What I did is gave him too much credit preflop, and didn't believe postflop, when in reality I had no reason to believe he was that good, or tricky. I forget exactly how big his stack was by the time the final bet went in, and it may have still been OK to go with the hand, but I suspect not, or it wouldn't have bugged me so much.

Another hand, I had KK and 3-bet a LAG opener. Again the BB (a different one) called with a medium stack (40-60 BB), this time for a pretty large 3-bet. The flop was undercards, and he min-checkraised me on the flop. I put him in, after thinking about folding. Again, it may have been the right play, but his actual holding totally surprised me. Again, I was giving him a bit too much credit, assuming he was trapping with AA, in spite of the stats I had on him, which didn't suggest a tricky player. I talked myself out of folding because again, I didn't want to put him on that one hand, and thought if he doesn't have that one hand, I'm in good shape. Well, he had 77 and had made a set. Again, I think that more often than not, going with an overpair on the flop in a 3-bet pot is going to be OK, that's not the point. The point is that I gave him enough credit to not make that call getting such poor odds since with my 3-bet I either have him crushed or I'm flipping with him.

In both cases, instead of going with the straightforward story both villains were telling me, I gave them more credit than warranted, and also kept thinking myself into a different conclusion than they were saying. Against a tricky player, that's fine and even needed. Against the guys that I'm trying to table select for, that's counter-productive.

A post or two ago, I discussed being theoretically sound, but making poor assumptions, leading to poor conclusions. I think the problem is not believing the obvious story from the straightforward players. Without a read, I probably need to do a better job of determining when someone is likely to be making a play. Against the straightforward player, I need to do a better job of just believing what they say, and if they tricked me, then good for them.

I actually got a little more time than I thought for this entry :). Have a merry Christmas!