Bizarro

Poker is really strange for me in that sometimes I do exactly the opposite I should do, but in both directions.  Like sometimes on the turn with a made hand, I'll make a totally weak/tight fold, yet other times with a made hand I'll make a totally spewy call or raise all in.  I'm picking the turn specifically because I'm trying to do a lot of thinking about my turn play.  Most of the hands I "get wrong" when I send them to Jared are mostly misplayed on the turn.  In a recent video swap with Josh, he also found some instances of pretty poor turn play.  Not saying I have the other streets down, but I do think that the turn is where I make my biggest mistakes.  But the whole idea of making opposite mistakes in both directions applies throughout my poker game.

For me, that makes it significantly harder to attack my own leaks.  Dunno if that's the case for everyone.  So what I do is keep iterating on a number of different things, continue probably making the same sorts of mistakes but to lesser and lesser degrees, until eventually I come out of a bad habit, at least for a while.  I keep thinking/hoping there's a more efficient way to improve -- especially with limited time and energy to dedicate to my game -- but I've yet to find it.  The good news is that I think I do continue to improve, and I continue to turn a profit.  I know that it's actually a good thing that poker is, if not hard, at least not simple.  But I keep thinking I'm just missing a magic bullet or two that would accelerate improvement.

A couple related things I really suck at relative to you guys:  player-specific adjustments, and bet/raise interpretation.  Unless I'm really focused, and it's not even so good then, I tend to play against everyone as if I'm playing against a TAG, or more accurately against myself.  I see what they do, and I think what it would mean if I did it, and go from there.  I know that's wrong, believe me, but even being aware of it, I find myself struggling to put villains' actions in the context of the player type they are, and to exploit specific weaknesses beyond the simplest ones (like isolating the loose passives, c-betting as a bluff against the guys who fold to c-bet a lot, etc.).  And even against TAGs, I totally mis-interpret their bets and raises sometimes.  I guess that's why I find myself making bizarro decisions sometimes, actually.

In case this post comes off as being too whiny, I will say that I believe there are a lot more things going right with my game than are going wrong with it.  Just that there are always weak points no matter how good you are, and that's what I'm thinking about in terms of the weak points in my game.

Oh (and this is whiny :P ), I continue to run like shit in lessons!  I dropped over a BI in not that many hands, and that was even with winning a few medium pots.  But lost a BI on a flip, and even more frustrating was a fairly big fish who kept redistributing my money...he called any piece down against everyone, but against my good second and top pair hands, he had just a barely better hand like four times.  So, he would get my money, then call down ace high and bottom pairs to the rest of the table.  Grrr.  That said, I picked a couple things up from the lesson that were new and should help, plus reinforced some of the good things I'm doing.