i have not been in the mood to play the last couple of days... i am a part of two study groups that meet on sundays and spent about 6 hrs in them. as i reviewed some of my HM and watched some players who are playing lower stakes something came to me. not that i haven't thought about it before but i think i'll write about it.

and it's this: adjustments
it applies to life just as much as poker. when you're at the table and you have a 58/2 on your left over 700 hands and he folds to cbets 22% of the time and you're in the CO, what do you do? do you continue to open Suited Connectors and cbet every flop OOP and then chastise the donkey on your left for not folding to the flop with broadway cards when he has bottom pair? who's fault is it really? you know what he's going to do and expect him to fold anyway? i see this a ton at 100NL and lower. even from regulars.

there's no one set style to play to win the most at poker. maybe an optimal style is to cbet around 70% of the time against normal, thinking opponents but in this case most of your cbets should be for value. if you can't make this adjustment, then the next best adjustment is probably to leave the table. the player who wins the most is the one who makes the best adjustments to their opponents. I think that's what makes players like AEjones and Greg so great at HU. Another example of adjustments is what Probability had to do in his last HU match. One of the big new fads is to have a positive redline and he has that for around the first 85% of his HU graph. Now the last player he played was super aggro, if Matt tried to win every pot w/oSD and tried to outaggress this donk he would have given up a large part of his edge. he wasn't stubborn trying to keep his redline up... he made correct adjustments and grinded the opponent down.

i've recently tried to apply this thinking to life as well. i've had a few rough things happen to me in the last 365 days. people who've read my other blog and who know me well have known what i've gone through. and instead of getting upset over the things i can't control, and holding grudges, etc., i've begun to let these things roll off my back. it's such a waste of energy to be mad about things you have no control of (i.e. running bad, parent did you wrong when you were a kid, girl you're into strings you along or dumps, you get a flat tire when driving, or whatever causes you to life tilt). i've tried to take steps in improving my perspective and making proper life and poker adjustments.

gl on and off the tables