The Overeducated Poker Player

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Search this site: Home News Poker Rooms Poker Rules Poker Tips Holdem Rules Holdem Strategy Holdem Tips Poker School WSOP The Overeducated Poker Player Published by Brian Cherry on Jul 28, 2010 teacher

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One of the best things about the modern era of poker is how accepted it is in the general culture. Poker players are no longer relegated to dark, smoke filled back rooms or cheesy saloons. The game has made it to the cultural mainstream and in places like the United States; poker tournaments on television draw more viewers than legitimate sports like Hockey and Soccer. This has all been good news and like any major industry, the explosion of Texas Hold’em has served to support many peripheral business concerns as well. Poker publishing , camps for poker tournament instruction, and Texas Hold’em instruction have all exploded. Once again, this is generally a good thing. The bad part is when a poker player becomes over educated and begins to play Texas Hold’em in a formulaic manner. poker websites, poker flash, free poker, poker for fun, online poker for fun
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The problem with a lot of the Texas Hold’em books and other instruction that is meant to turn somebody from an amateur into poker tournament/cash game titan is that much of it was developed by professionals who were playing against other professionals. This is all fine and dandy if Annie Duke and Phil Ivey are regulars at your home game or you compete against them and their ilk during your poker tournament experiences, but most of us don’t do our playing against competition at that level. A lot of us find ourselves regularly pitted against the Tasmanian devils from the online poker genre or complete amateurs who don’t know when they should fold. In short, if you know Sklansky’s writing inside, outside, upside-down, and backwards and play your poker from that perspective, your best opponent is probably somebody else who whose philosophy is similar to yours. If your Texas Hold’em approach is one of a rigid Sklansky or Brunson disciple, and you find yourself against an opponent whose poker philosophy seems to come from the book “Rules for Radicals” or “Horton Hears a Who”, the chaos of their game may do your bankroll some serious damage. poker websites, poker flash, free poker, poker for fun, online poker for fun
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This is not simply unsupported opinion there is precedent for this. We have a lot of fun at Phil Hellmuth’s expense over here (that is just what comes with the territory of being the “poker brat”), but the truth is that he is a very technically sound player. With that said, once you get the man outside his fish bowl of poker pros who play the game the same way he does, he becomes an extremely weak opponent. His rigid ideological approach to the game does not have the flexibility built into it to adjust to a landscape that has radically changed over the past few years. He is like a technically trained boxer trying to compete in an MMA ring. It just doesn’t work. poker websites, poker flash, free poker, poker for fun, online poker for fun
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Knowledge is power, but there must also be flexibility to any approach. A player who buys to hard into any particular philosophy of the game risks becoming obsolete when the tactics change. The books people learned from two decades ago are hardly as relevant today as they were then and neither are the players who either wrote them or based their entire style on them. A good poker tip to follow is that one should actively educate themselves in the game, but devote yourself to one school of thought, or believe that there are any absolutes in a game with so many X factors is bankroll suicide. poker websites, poker flash, free poker, poker for fun, online poker for fun
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