daytripper84

Question 1: What is your motivation for playing poker?

I believe I have more than one answer to this question. It's a game I like to play, as well as improve upon. I have always been one to enjoy the types of hobbies where one can progress his own game (eg. chess) and poker fit the bill. Another reason is to push my limits. I want to see how far I can really go in the future, I want to have what it takes to win consistently at a high level. Finally, I think an obvious one but nevertheless a motivational factor is money. As a college student, I don't really want to take a part time job while going to school, and having poker as a hobby/supplementary income solves this. And who wouldn't want to be able to buy a new laptop/pc/pay off bills or any extra debts because they are good at a game? I know I would.

Question 2: What are your weaknesses when playing poker?

I have a lot of weaknesses playing poker. I probably would say I have 2 main weaknesses though. The first is knowing when to know when I'm beat - knowing when to fold. When I have 1/3 or so of my stack left on the river with AA and the river makes a flush and villain pushes all in after call my bets in position, I need to learn to stop making calls like that. So knowing when I'm beat and accepting that fact is a big deal for me. Another problem is knowing what to do in marginal spots in post flop play - if I have middle pair and i get a half pot size bet on the flop, or anything that is marginal like that (at least in my mind).

Question 3: What does it mean to play tight aggressive?

Playing TAG poker for me is a top few hands, played in an agressive style preflop and preferrably postflop depending on the lay of things. Get all your money in when you know it's + ev by raising, and get out when you don't. Raising or folding is always the preferred 2 options as a tag - you want your opponents to make mistakes. While players like nanonoko are amazing winning LAG players, that takes quite a while to learn, and by becoming a winning player first as a TAG, one removes himself of the marginal spots and makes his or her decision making a lot easier. TAG is suitable for all levels of poker - and is usually the overall average style that winning players use.

Welcome to the Course and Best of Luck. Good job! Homework #1 Done!

And who wouldn't want to be able to buy a new laptop/pc/pay off bills or any extra debts because they are good at a game?

Totally true, that's what I have done, bought me a laptop/PC from the winnings. Just keep in progress your learning phase and try to become better and will most likely reach it as well.

Most of the weakness you wrote can easily be fixed by posting hands (analyzing your session). We will start writing feedback to your play. Usually negative feedback will put you into thinking phase and trying to fix all those leaks. It's almost the same as you lose money, you will remember it more than winning part. By this situation it's gonna be that negative feedback you gonna remember and try to avoid them next time.

What about tilt? Do you adjust something against it? For example:
Easiest way to fight against tilt is to set up stop-loss technique. Which means if you for example have lost more than 3BIs for a session then you just stop the session for some time. The BI amount is set up from your own results. Some may put it higher, some lower. Also after the stop you can spend some time with evaluation part to become better.

Tight style is usually called playing selected hands. Like following the Starting Hand Chart. Aggressive should be also pretty clear that already the word says how you should be playing. But the problem playing aggressively is that you have to watch that you don't play too aggressive. Find good spots, find good targets. About The tight-aggressive strategy you can read in this article: "What is the Big Stack Strategy?"

Hopefully you will enjoy the Course.

Yeah, one of the problems with my game is pulling the plug when things go bad - I especially found this out after last nights session after I posted this. While most of my decisions were +ev, my play faltered a bit to decrease down to break even/only slightly +ev play in the long haul. I was pretty annoyed that I was about 10 buyins -ev (40 cents with SSS per buy in). I really just want to get up to a decent bankroll to start playing BSS, but it's hard when one has nights like these. So right now my bankroll is sitting at a lowly $5.67. Want at least $30, maybe even 25 before switching to BSS, so it may be a while till I am able to actually play that strategy, and decide to do homework #2. Here is last night's graph:

It's amazing how quickly things can change in one day, not only did I make all the buyins back that I lost, I made about 4-5 more too :). Pretty awesome session today.

Hehe, well done mate! In poker everything can change with just few hands. Being down in first part of session -5BIs and after couple of hands being in up, everything can change. You just must have faith in yourself and try to continue playing your A-game.