Your style of play is the one that i'm having the worst problems dealing with. I just hate the whole limping / passiveness / small ball approach.

Any tips on how to combat this style, as an aggressive player?

I usually try to play it the same way and make a hand or two but if i don't i just end up delaying the match for the blinds to get to 40/80 and then just shove / fold according to NASH.

Well first of all after reading my advice make sure you don't play me and use it against me ;)

I think the most obvious thing that people fail to do is give me credit for a hand when I have one. I rarely raise from the sb or bb so when I do you need to give that raise some respect.

The same with calls, if you are raising a lot from the sb or bb and I'm folding, the rare times I call or re-raise you simply need to get out of the way. These are the leaks most players fail to recognize when playing me. If you plug those you are going to have a lot more success!

Cheers

Paul

Hehe. That's what i usually do, i raise ATC from SB just to steal the blinds and when i do get called or 3bet i usually proceed VERY carefully on the flop or just fold / shove if i have a shovable hand. The problem is adjusting to your style takes a lot of patience and patience is not one of my strong virtues :)

Don't worry about me playing you, i will avoid you like the plague if i see you sitting :D

There's another 100 reg with your exact same style of play which owned me pretty bad due to my impatience... fydor_8 i think is his name.

I've seen Fyodor at the tables but haven't played him. But anyway, another thing you can and SHOULD do is get good at assigning ranges against villains. So in this instance say someone who plays Cog's style calls one of your raises. Well you pretty much know he's got a strong hand. So if the flop comes low, completely missing the top hands you can cbet knowing that it probably missed villain. Though he may float because he's seen you be a bit aggro. So if turn blanks again you can double barrel and put villain in a tough spot to call again if just has something like AT, QJ, KQ, etc.

Having said that, be ready to adjust because someone like Cog is good enough to adjust to your play and trap or rebluff you next time. But against people who fail to adjust it's some good stuff.

Without patience I don't like your chances. The two most important skills, patience and discipline...

Trank's post looks like good advice to me too.

Paul

Hey Paul aka Mr. Dissonance, I just watched the video. You do a really good job of explaining your thought process which is great. Hopefully you'll continue that in future video's. Also, I like that there isn't much background noise. Other than some dripping water? Sounded like you were in the hull of an ocean freighter or something, hah. But yeah, all around great job.

Hey Trank, thanks for the props.
I'll definitely go through my thought processes in every video. I think it helps you understand the logic, or lack of logic behind all the decisiosns. Not sure about the water sound, I have a new microphone (logitec) and make sure the vids are made when I'm alone in the house. Perhaps my brain dripping out my ear?

Cheers

Paul

as already said earlier - congratz on beeing a "full time instructor" now!!! paul is def a good addition as hes a great teacher imo

daniel 

Thanks!

Appreciate the support mate :-)

I was really impressed with your video as it has given me a lot to think about regarding how to play those aggressive donks which give me trouble for some reason.

I was blown away by the limping late in the match with the A9o and hands like that as they are typically shoves for me to take the blinds.

I noticed you play mostly regular speed HU matches, do you think your style would work at turbos or do the blinds move up to fast to be effective?

Hey Ravenfan,

I'm glad you liked the video. One of my goals is to show members that more than one style of play can be effective. I think my style works better at regular speed games than turbos, but it's still useful to have as another gear to switch to if you need it in the turbo game.

The aggressive guys are the hardest to deal with of course, but by exercizing pot control and using a mixture of trapping and floating (if he has a fold button) you can make them very profitable.

Cheers

Paul

Liked it.

"strange" style but obv it works.

Question: when the blinds get higher don't you think you should became more aggressive?

Nice vid buddy, it's greate idea for some new videos with diffrent style of play. I think that changing gears is very useful thing, and this video could help me to mixing my game style. Thanks a lot.

And please don't  do vid. at bathroom ;)

Is it your general style or just against this type of opponent ?

Yeah I do tend to open up a lot more when the blinds increease, depending on the opponent.

Not sure where the drippping noise is coming from. I can't hear it on this copy. If it's on the next video then I'll definitely be intrigued!

Cheers

Paul

That's my style against aggressive opponents. I open up a lot more against tighter players.

have learnt a lot from it.i would like to see how you adapt to a more passive opponent.maybe this is an idea for a video in the future.

Hey Koahhe,

Very glad you liked it. I just did a vid against an annoying min betting pot stabber. For the one after that I'll do a passive opponent :)

Personally I find the passive guys are money in the bank against this style.

Cheers

Paul

I really liked that video. The approach to playing the game is quite interesting and although some plays are too passive for my liking the video did a good job at reminding me to probably sometimes stick more to ABC poker and try less fancy moves...

The thing I liked most about the video a) the replay-format instead of a livevideo and b) your explanations. You did a great job explaining your thoughts, talking about the reads (villains potsized bets vs. his shoves), talking about how you plan to set your opponent up in specific spots or what you had planned as a move on the next street(s)...

Hopefully there will be more videos from you like this soon.

I appreciate the feedback :)

The next video is done and I expect it will go up in 5-6 days. I play 2 opponents. The first match is against a tricky style, the min raising constant betting approach. The second is a short match where I make a nice play with AA. I hope you also enjoy that video.

My 3rd video will be a match against a tight-passive opponent, so you can see that I really do adjust my play to the different opponents. In that match I make a lot of laydowns!

Cheers

Paul

HI Paul

 Let me just say I love the 2 videos, that you have done for now.

Maybe it is just me but your teaching skills does come true in your videos.

And happy to see, that there are more to come from you, Congrtz on the "full  time instructor"

keep it up

Thanks Boomerang :)

Excellent video !

I'm more the aggressive guy who likes to take initiative and push my opponents around, but this video and your excellent commentary really helped me see a completely different view of the game.

Last night, I even tried your style myself against an opponent like the one you played against - where my standard aggressive style didn't work really well because the guys was almost never folding and trying to bluff me all the time.  It worked really well, the guy simply didn't give me any credit at all for a hand when I limp/called.

I can only imagine you most likely also have a very low variance due to your passive style.  Against that guy last night, the only thing I could have done with my old style would have been playing for stacks with some marginal made hand because he 3bet me extremely light and also donked and check-raised a lot of flops, so I really had no idea what to do except wait for a spot and then put my money in.  But then I remembered your video and thought maybe there's another way of beating this guy.

When I started limping, checking behind and folding, this threw the guy completely off - he actually lowered his aggression, but still kept bluffing me often enough that I could completely control the flow of the match and the size of the pots.  I won the match, and he sat me three more times trying to prove to himself that I'm an idiot, and I owned him really badly ;-)

Btw. is it possible that you played the $50's somewhere in January ?  I think I already played against you and you owned me really badly.  If I remember correctly, I even rematched you a few times because I simply couldn't imagine that someone playing your style could be a winning player - and I lost all of them.

Your style made me tilt really badly, I always tried to bluff you and got so frustrated because you seemed to always know exactly what I had. Watching this video also showed me many leaks I had in my game against more passive players.

Looking forward to see more videos from you in the future,

Jack

Hey Jack thanks for the kind words.

I'm glad you enjoyed it and if it managed to give you a second gear then I'm very happy, that was one of my main goals. You can't entirely imitate another players style without a lot of work, but you can have it as another tool to pull out of the box when you need it. 

It's very possible I played you in January, but of course that was hundreds of games ago, so I can't remember the matches :)

The next two vids are made, one against a min-raiser and one against a tight player. After that I'll do a calling station and then most of the styles will be covered once.

Good luck at the tables.

Paul

Cool :-)

Btw. you mentioned something about your "3 rules of bluffing" in the video - will you also talk a bit more about that in your future videos ?

Just watched your guest video as well and I really liked what you said at the end, that it's important to be patient and wait for good spots - I think prior to watching the video, I would have tried to re-bluff that guy or call one of this overbets with ace high - just spewing off chips.  That's where I lost so much money in the past - I think I've simply been too scared of getting blinded out, even at 15/30, to simply wait for a hand and put my money in good.

Patience and discipline. I think they are the key attributes for a poker player. You can make a lot of money with them, even if the rest of your game isn't strong.

The 3 rules of bluffing I want to make into a seperate.  I need to collect a bunch of hands from different games to illustrate my points, so it might take a while. And at the moment I'm working on a seperate project apart from normal videos, so that one is a while off.

Anyway....patience :) It's my poker mantra.. be patient and play to win.

Cheers

Paul

Great video......i like the Patience and waiting side of your game.................ive also noticed that all your videos seem to be on Full Tilt.....is this because you prefere the  blind struture?....also do you play only the  reg games?   if so ...is it because the longer blind limits grive you a edge and more time to profile your oppenent?......sorry the  questions are not that related to the video,but just wanna try and get how you think....if you know what i mean....thank you

Excellent video, I have to work my thought process and make plans, thanks.

This was a great video but there is one hand I don't quite understand. At around 33:00 you decide to call a min raise oop with T2s saying you think you have gread odds. Granted you are getting 3 to 1 but you only have 14 bb and are out of position. The villain has shown a tendancy to make pot sized bets post flop so this doesn't seem like an easy hand to play hand against him out of position and with such a short stack.

Can you go into a little more detail on why you think this is a good hand to play?

Yup those are exactly the reasons. Slower blind structure = better chance for skill to come through imo.

Hey SB, I think I probably need to do the maths on these spots. My initial idea is accurate, that you are getting good odds on calling ATC to a min-raise, but how shallow should you tighten up and stop playing junk is a good question. My guess is somewhere around 15bbs is going to be the cut-off point, but I think it needs more accurate maths!
Glad you enjoyed the video :)

Hi,

I know I am a little bit late and this is an old video, just joined the site.

I have a question about the QTo hand played at arround 13min into the video. After we have seen him bluff pot size, and most of his bets were pot size, don't you think that an average villain would make adjustments and mix in a few of his good hands to extract value based on his bluffy nature? i find this call very though, not due to a fact we're holding third pair on a board with str8 options, (if he is bluffing we can shove over him with air) but because of the fact, that we might get exploted with an ace or better, thiking we will call light 'cause of his image. 

Is my thought process complety wrong or is that something worth considering?

gl

Yeah that's exactly the danger, that eventually they will repeat the betting pattern when they have a good hand and we pay them off. It's always someting we have to consider, but I think the odds are in favor of calling until he proves capable of making this play,

"Galloping Donkey Moron!" @24:00. Worth watching the video just to see you play like one, too! Hell, no way I'm getting away from top pair against that player. Ha.

How often do you think you play like a "Galloping Donkey Moron"?

Entertainment value aside, this video comes in at a solid four star rating.

Luckily not too often! But tbh I think I tend to forget my errors pretty quickly (not a good thing). It often shocks me just how badly I play sometimes... luckily a lot of the player-pool just manages to play worse.