Ship It, Fish!

You are an extremely skilled player, but you have three major weaknesses: ... betting out into pots ... with hands like bottom pair, and then folding to raises; ... you play too loose; [and] you call too many raises

I am very appreciative of your analysis of my play! I think you're an excellent player and are frankly one of the few players I fear at Greg's game on limit nights. So, analysis from you is something I take very seriously.

You are quite right that my play on limit nights at Greg's has sometimes been very poor in many of the sessions when you and I both played. I recall many of the strategies you describe as experiments gone awry.

My feeling is often that Greg's game is so tight that I have to push marginal hands further and play looser to adjust in that game. I still think somewhat looser play in that game is correct (but tighter than I am typically playing there). However, you very correctly identified my key mistakes in my attempts to play looser: I far too often call raises cold (or from the blinds) with marginal holdings. It puts me in very complicated spots, and it lead me to do things like betting middle pair hoping that the flop missed people with overcards and they'll fold. I then compound that error by not following up with proper aggressiveness, which is precisely the reason those plays you use work so well. I also frequently fail to readjust when others arrive, and we cease to be a small group of tight-aggressive players. I too often ignore that constantly adjusting, and not "one adjust per night" is central to poker success. Lots of stuff to think about.

Indeed, I remember distinctly once calling you down when short-handed with a K9 on a K-J-x flop, despite that you'd thrown raises in and were playing very aggressively. When it was done, you had nothing, I said: "Huh?" and you said: "I knew you'd fold a Jack." I have thought about and reanalyzed that hand many times since then, and your explanation above clarifies my thinking about it now. Thanks for that!

I also have stupid psychological reasons for the mistakes I make in Greg's limit game, which are: I am enjoying myself and I like the people and just don't care if I leak off some online winnings to that group. So, I am very often not playing my best game there. That's of course silly. Even with my good friends in that group like nick_marden, I don't want to ever soft-play or otherwise goof-off, because we have the most fun when we're playing our best games against each other. Getting over that psychological factor, though, is something I really need to focus on if I'm going to be a positive-EV player in that limit game. (I'm doing much better in NL there than limit, as it turns out, and am working on a post about that.)