Suckout King
05-14-2006, 03:36 PM
Long before I was a poker players I was quite a decent bridge player. Quite often in bridge you have to take educated guesses and guess where a particular face card is. If you guess right you make your contract or get an overtrick, if you guess wrong well that is one less trick/point for you.
Quite often I would see people saying - well you should have played it the other way because that's where the queen/king etc was. Sometimes this would be taken further and people would look at everyone's holdings and work out how the hand could - and in their logic SHOULD have been made.
Of course hindsight is clouding their judgement. You play it the best way you can and then the truth of it is the actual cards are irrelevant. The skillful decision making BEFORE you see the cards is what counts.
If you call an all in with KK to see AA against a loose player who has been going all in a lot on a wide range of hands are you wrong? If there were any tells that could have given it away then possibly but 99% of the time against a loose aggressive player this would be the correct decision. Often you do not have 100% of the information you would like before making a decision.
Two things are key
a) you get all the info you can and bring it to bare on every important decision. This means watching and studying a lot of hands in which you were not involved and applying it to these key decisions.
b) you make the best decision you can on the information you have.
Studying hands is important and is probably the best way of patching leaks in your game and improving. I would always recommend printing out key hands in a ring game or tournament and studying them but it is important that you do not let hindsight lead you into making the wrong conclusions from a hand.
Quite often I would see people saying - well you should have played it the other way because that's where the queen/king etc was. Sometimes this would be taken further and people would look at everyone's holdings and work out how the hand could - and in their logic SHOULD have been made.
Of course hindsight is clouding their judgement. You play it the best way you can and then the truth of it is the actual cards are irrelevant. The skillful decision making BEFORE you see the cards is what counts.
If you call an all in with KK to see AA against a loose player who has been going all in a lot on a wide range of hands are you wrong? If there were any tells that could have given it away then possibly but 99% of the time against a loose aggressive player this would be the correct decision. Often you do not have 100% of the information you would like before making a decision.
Two things are key
a) you get all the info you can and bring it to bare on every important decision. This means watching and studying a lot of hands in which you were not involved and applying it to these key decisions.
b) you make the best decision you can on the information you have.
Studying hands is important and is probably the best way of patching leaks in your game and improving. I would always recommend printing out key hands in a ring game or tournament and studying them but it is important that you do not let hindsight lead you into making the wrong conclusions from a hand.