Quest for Greatness

www.donkfestpoker.com / www.6max.nl

I think I’ve made a tremendous amount of progress over the past week pretty much studying the game all day long, because I have nothing else to do since I’m waiting for DC to get me tracked on Unibet.

My progress pretty much evolves around my postflop skills. And I want to go over two conecpts, which I’ve learned by watching alot of videos on DC and taking notes. I think those concepts are probably the most important things for developing from an autopiloting micro-stakes game player or somewhat ok small-stakes player (but no idea what he’s doing post flop), to a good thinking player having the potential to steadily improve and move up.

Those two concepts are called “Isolation Advantage” and “Thinking Outside the Box”:

The term Isolation Advantage includes the strategy to target certain players you have an edge over.
This edge is basically divided into 3 parts:
-Skill advantage
-Positional advantage
-Card advantage
You obviously want to keep your advantage over other players as large as possible. Meaning if we have a player on our table, which is a total fish, we obviously have a huge skill advantage over this type of player. But this gives us also the freedom to give up some of our card or positional advantage, because we basically have better post-flop skills than this player and can outplay him. So we can confidently open up our game and play more loosely against him.
If we would be up against a decent player, which has somewhat of an idea how to play postflop, our skill advantage isn’t as big anymore and we have to rely more on positional and sometimes card advantage. So we have to play tighter against this opponent. So you always have to ask yourself “What is my edge?”

Which leads me to the next concept thinking outside the box:
The reason why beginners are taught a playing style, which is very tight and follows specific rules based on player generalisations is basically because beginners don’t have a fucking clue what to do post flop and they don’t have alot of skill advantage over the other bad players. This is thinking inside the box. The problem with this sometimes is that players think those specific rules they were given at the beginning are the ultimate and optimal ways how to beat the game. It’s not. The beauty about poker is there is no optimal strategy, but there are several ways how to exploit your opponents and they all work, which leads me to the beauty of thinking outside the box. This is where you can take any action you want, IF you have a good reason for it!
As soon as you keep on studying the game your skill advantage increases, which gives you the opportunity to take your first steps outside this box you were put into and develop your own style. Through this you can apply so much more creativity to your game and literally let your mind from the leash. THIS is what poker makes so damn interesting. The more skill you have and the higher you move up in stakes the more it becomes a mental game.

Look out!

There’s a new player in town!

… or atleast at the tables.

“Quest for Greatness” pretty much describes me trying to move up in stakes as high as I can.
I will use this blog to share my experiences as well as my progress in poker and also life in general. I’m also blogging on www.donkfestpoker.com / www.6max.nl with Acombfosho from DC. You might wanna check it out.

Maybe I should just tell you guys a little bit about myself and how my poker career went so far:

I’m a German poker player and live near Cologne right now, which is almost right at the western border of Germany next to the Netherlands. The first time I was introduced to Texas Hold’Em was when I spent a whole year as a foreign exchange student in Minnesota, USA. This was in 05/06 and it just was an incredible experience for me. Whenever somebody asks me about my year in USA, I can’t recommend this enough to anybody who is considering something like this. Spending a whole year in a different country where you don’t know anybody at first, have to take things into your own hands, communicate in a different language pretty much 24/7 will have a great impact on your own development. Anyhow, when I was first introduced to the game by a couple of friends and won most of the time, and then crushed most of host family’s relatives at a home cash game I knew I must have some kind of talent playing this. So I decided to get better with this.

Unfortunately, by the time I turned 18 I didn’t have that much of an understanding of the game and lacking discipline, so I only played occasionally throughout the years and picked up some knowledge on the way. But I still managed to turn 30 bucks into 300-400. That was already a huge accomplishment for me and I cashed everything out, because I needed money.

When I turned 20 this February I deposited about 450€ and knew that if I want to get better at poker I will have to put alot of dedication to this. So I chose to sign up at DeucesCracked.com, where I quickly made friends with other players like Acombfosho and kept working on my game. I played throughout the entire month of February and the beginning of March and managed to almost double my entire bankroll. Then I tried another site called CarlosPoker, where I had a pretty sick badbeat and lost about 1/4 of my bankroll. This hurt me pretty bad and I took a break for about 1-2 weeks. I started playing at FullTilt again, where my winrate skyrocketed and made up for my downswing a couple of weeks ago. At around the end of March I had to take a break from poker again because I really needed the time to focus solely on school. My last school exams were coming up in April, which are harder than in most other countries. But I successfully passed those and now I’m back on track again. Having nothing else on my plate right now, except poker.

My goal is pretty much to reach NL100 by September or October, which is realistic I think.

I’m also looking forward to work together with Acombfosho over the summer. Our plan is to basically review our game once a week, pluging each others leaks and kinda work together in moving up the stakes.

Oh btw, please forgive me any spelling or maybe grammer errors since english isn’t my first language but it should be fine considering that I’ve spent a whole year speaking it. Haha

So long,

See you at the tables!