General Discussion Poker Forums

Bluff Europe occasionally run live training courses, and DC were given a ticket to attend; after a PM exchange with Krantz I agreed to go and write a review. If you're interested, read on...

On Saturday afternoon, 10th April, I ventured into the Grosvenor Victoria casino in London for the Bluff Europe Poker Academy, in association with Black Belt Poker.

I’d never been to anything like this before, so wasn’t really sure what to expect; however the topics themselves seemed quite interesting and I was particularly keen on hearing what Neil Channing and Jared Tendler had to say, so I was cautiously optimistic. I play almost exclusively small stakes (100-400NL) heads up cash games online and have limited live experience outside of homegames, so was hoping for some pointers on live play – things like not giving away tells myself whilst spotting them in others.

Once I got up to the poker room, I found the atmosphere was pretty relaxed (most of the people there had won their seat through Black Belt Poker, which is like a cross between Facebook and DC that has their own iPoker skin) even though the mix of people in attendance was quite varied (roughly 20 people total with three women, a few 18-25s, mostly 26-40s with a couple of older guys). The majority played predominantly live poker (some hadn’t even heard of PT3/HEM or sites like DC/CR) and were aware that they had big leaks in their game that they wanted to try and fix during the sessions.

This was a one-day course, broken down into four “lectures” and two “play with the pros” discussions where we’d be split into groups and play a few hands and then the professionals in attendance would talk through the action that just happened - first to present was Alex.

Alex Rousso: Meta-Learning
This was a short presentation on how to go about learning at poker. The premise was that everyone has a default system for playing - irrespective of whether that system is any good or not; the first step to improving is recognising your default strategy and accepting its flaws – then you can improve by cherry-picking from the various sources on and offline to bolster your skill set.

He gave a few examples of how to work on your game live and online (e.g. trying to put your opponents on hands when you’re not in the hand and awarding yourself points depending on how you do), but always brought it back to basic principles, principally that with a sound grasp of the fundamentals you will never be an empty seat at the table, and that opportunities to learn are always presenting themselves so be alert to your surroundings.

After a “play with the pros” session (I’ll get to them later) came Jared Tendler.

Jared Tendler: Tilt Management
Jared Tendler was a last-minute replacement for Nick Persaud. For those who haven’t heard of him, Jared is an extremely well respected poker mind coach, similar to Tommy Angelo (author of “The Elements of Poker” and producer of “The Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment” on DC), and does a lot of work on recognising and reducing Tilt.

Jared’s background is actually in Golf, so he differs from Tommy in that his methodology is firmly rooted in the emotional side of Tilt – e.g. road rage, rather than direct poker-related causes.

He spoke for roughly 20 minutes, with the key message being that in order to reduce Tilt’s effect we need to recognise our onset behaviour patterns; the indicators, the reaction and finally tolerance levels and then work on all three independently for best results. He gave a few tips and exercises to do, and then opened up the floor to questions.

I felt that this was not really long enough for such a fascinating (and essential to our financial wellbeing!) subject, but knowing that Tommy Angelo’s video series was on DC I wasn’t too bothered. I also felt that the pitch was slightly too highbrow for the majority of the crowd, as Jared’s concepts are slightly existential (I felt so anyway) and need to be simplified greatly if given in such a short burst. That said, him merely being there, irrespective of how long, was worth it in my eyes.

We then moved onto Hugh Kirton’s talk on Levelling.

Hugh Kirton: Poker Psychology and Player Levels
Hugh is a member of Black Belt Poker, mainly playing online PLO and HE ring games, and he spoke about how to identify the levels that our opponents are thinking on and then how to gain the upper hand against them during the course of a session.

Like Jared’s presentation, I felt that this could have been expanded upon a lot further, as the concept of levelling was new to a lot of the crowd. However, I think the main aim was to introduce the idea that “you don’t just play your cards”, and that we need to be vigilant if we are to maintain the upper hand against our opponents.

Then we had the second of the “play with the pros” sessions before lunch. The 18 or so people in attendance were split into three groups, each group with a pro – Alex, Neil or Hugh. In the first break we focussed on ring-game play when 100BBs deep, and in the second we looked at mid-game SNG strategy.

These were by far the most interesting sessions, in my opinion. As I’ve mentioned, the majority of the people on the course were aware that they needed to get better, but didn’t know where to begin, so actually playing hands in their usual way and then having everyone turn over their cards and talking through the streets once at showdown was very useful. It went further than that though; to really ram the discussion home the instructors put hypotheticals into the hands – e.g. for the mid-game SNG hands, the instructors would ask what player X would do with the same hand if they had slightly less chips, or what hand would be at the bottom of their shoving range from the hijack with 9BBs.

Whilst this might not be anything new so far as poker training sites are concerned, it accentuated the point that in order to improve you need to take the results out of your head and focus on the decisions themselves – so long as you reasoned the correct path it shouldn’t matter what the outcome is.

Lastly was Neil Channing, who talked through four TV hands from the Party Poker “Poker Den 3” which was on TV in the UK last year. This was most similar to the “play with the pros” sections, so again it was quite useful – Neil is a talkative guy, and wasn’t afraid to say that he’d made a mistake in a certain hand so it was quite a light-hearted end to the day.

All in all, I thought that the day was in essence a beginner’s course in applying “online” techniques (e.g. thinking in terms of ranges rather than single hands, taking notes, learning the maths, thinking about how your opponents are thinking) to heighten your poker abilities.

Whilst it is probably below the standard of most people who are already subscribing to sites like DC/CR (and the slew of videos etc. available), I felt that it was pitched in the most part at the right level for those attending, so I would recommend a course like this in the future; I did feel that a lot was accomplished in the limited time, and hopefully it sowed the seeds of intellectual curiosity in the attendees. I would caveat that however by saying you can probably find specific videos online if you look in the right places.

The two-day course in May has Annette_15 speaking, and should be more advanced if anyone is interested. See http://www.bluffeurope.com/pokeracademy/ for more details.

Did you play the tourney afterwards?