Not all Girls are Created Equal

I like hard work and I like to break a sweat, so one of the many hats I wear is that of a part time landscaper during the summer.  I do a lot of poker thinking between all the pruning, weeding and shoveling.  Today I found myself buried in a 9 foot hedge, giving it a mid summer hair cut and thinking about hand ranges.  As I look back on my last year as a poker player, I can now recognize some of the chronic fundamental problems I was having as a new player. 

One significant problem was my inability to embrace the concept of ranges.  My superficial understanding of a 'hand ranges' would lend me to very narrow conclusions and often the wrong decision.  I would assign ranges that conveniently fit the given situation or would regurgitate some catch phrase in my mind of how "regs" play in common situations, without seeing the forest for the trees.

I hated the open-endedness of "ranges" and loved the sense of finality I got from putting people on a specific hand.  I don't think this was a conscious perception, but after taking a break and stepping back from the game, I can see the fault in my decision process.  I think this is a common mistake beginning players make, which is why you see the fish typing in the chat box "U had AK?"  It is also a hard one to fix because it's fluid and requires you to respond dynamically to each situation.  Any tendency to auto pilot also compounds this.  I have walk this road before and it only leads to losing sessions.

This is obviously nothing new to the world of poker players, but it's a concept that I have just finally realized in full clarity.   I guess it's rather hard to explain, but I feel like I'm finally seeing the whole picture.  It's like I was wearing toilet paper tubes for glasses - seeing only a narrow part of the game.  It's becoming more second nature to play vs ranges and to adapt those ranges based on actions, rather than locking down on specific hands.

Lets hope I can hold on to this 'ah ha' moment and leverage it in my game.