Randomly stumbled on this. It reminded me of the perfect bad-beat mindset.

A Zen master, Hakuin, was praised by his neighbours as one living a pure life.

A beautiful Japanese girl whose parents owned a food store lived near him. Suddenly, without any warning, her parents discovered she was with child.

This made her parents angry. She would not confess who the man was, but after much harassment at last named Hakuin.

In great anger the parents went to the master. “Is that so?” was all he would say.

After the child was born it was brought to Hakuin. By this time he had lost his reputation, which did not trouble him, but he took very good care of the child. He obtained milk from his neighbours and everything else he needed.

A year later the girl-mother could stand it no longer. She told her parents the truth — the real father of the child was a young man who worked in the fishmarket.

The mother and father of the girl at once went to Hakuin to ask forgiveness, to apologize at length, and to get the child back.

Hakuin was willing. In yielding the child, all he said was: “Is that so?”

And they say online poker is rigged..? Meet Ricky Jay.

Supposedly the best card handler ever, and thrower. I think it’s safe to say that the dude knows what he’s doing with a deck of cards. I’ll stick with a random number generator thanks.

Here’s a few more of his full presentation videos too.  » 

“Cuz all the good players say so..”

That’s not a bad reason. But there are better ones. The simplest answer is that poker is a game of incomplete information which means any information you can get is valuable. Your opponent acting first is information, therefore position is valuable.

If you ignore the effects of position and don’t adapt your thinking and your play for it, then even fish will get an inadvertent edge on you in some spots and your place at the table will be less profitable than it should be.

To the right is an interesting example of a perfectly good seat not working as well as it could because it’s being used in the wrong position. I know, right? It’s a powerful metaphor.

Anyway.. With experience, most of us pick up the value of position sub-consciously.

What I mean is, we’re aware of how much more difficult out-of-position decisions are as we’re making them — you know the times when you get that burning feeling of “fuuuck, this feels vulnerable.. *sigh*, I check”. That’s what I’m talking about. Instead of just dealing with those tough decisions as they arise, we should consider why they’re so much more difficult than others — position.  » 

Less Daniel. Back to durrrr again. Barry Greenstein gets played like a fiddle.

After his tragedy at the end of last week’s show, Negreanu doesn’t really do anything this episode. To be fair to him though, it looks like he wasn’t getting any cards at all. The youtube preview pic says it all for Ziggy, and Dwan seems to have developed a bizarre ability to lose a quarter million, make a sarcastic comment, then carry on smiling, joking and owning.

He does know that he’s played perfect poker on TV and looks like the best in the world though which probably helps.

GSN have got their act together and it looks like they’re uploading in 45 min hi-def again.

Losing a buy-in to a no-hope donk’s 2-outer is not a good feeling.

The anger and outrage it causes in less experienced players is sort of justified, but the jump from “lucky idiot” to conspiracies of dodgy dealing? Not so much.

I guess it’s not really surprising that people would reach that conclusion in the naturally skeptical world of poker, but no — online poker is not rigged. Sorry.

Bad runs happen. If they didn’t, it would be rigged. Bottom line? If you can’t take the swings, drop a stake or find something else to do.

Tilt control is a serious part of what separates winners from losers. Extracting value when you have the best of it is one skill — Surviving with your confidence intact and still playing a +EV game when you have the worst of it is another.

It’s almost like our brains have a built-in compensatory mechanism — we want to think our winnings are based on skill and our losses are based on luck. But a selective memory like that is something you really need to get past if you want to be any good at poker.  » 

Awesome interviews by Mediocre Poker Radio: Phil Galfond and Di + Hac Dang.

Phil Galfond is a seriously good player — if durrrr is the artist, Phil is the scientist. I would say they’re the two guys who are #1 at their contrasting hyper-aggressive/more passive styles.

Phil has a super thorough, massively analytical approach to the game. He likes to think everything through properly all the time, at every stage of every hand.

durrrr seems like he’s more impulsive and relies more on intuition and sick hand reading. Hopefully one day Tom will be on the show too.

The other thing that Phil is well known for is being really good at explaining higher level concepts to much stupider people.

Then there’s the brothers, Di and Hac Dang (Urindanger and trex313) who are both rock solid zero-to-nosebleed players who share their bankroll and always appear as if by magic when Gus Hansen sits in any of the monster games at Full Tilt. Both interviews are great.

I really should’ve won this tourney but I stopped listening to my spidey sense.

Cash games are more my thing, but all these “Spring deal” tournaments attract hoards of donating zombies who end up making them worth the effort. Started 10/20 with a $3k stack.

This is me kick starting my tourney life with an early level 3-barrel superhero bluff, and after that it was just general ownage all the way to the final-table-minus-one where my brain farted.

Here’s every significant hand from start to finish without all the boring tourney-folding in between. Read more to see how to cruise through 890 places and then blow up in 12th.  » 

Part two of my epic 12th place blow up.

Looking back, I think I just got tired, or distracted, or something. Either way, I suck. At the end of Part 1, we got all the way through to this hand:

The old -turn-raise-to-stop-the-gimp-from-min-bet-stealing move. Something I practice regularly. I’ve edited the publishing time of this one so that it shows up underneath part 1 on the homepage. Anyway - moar hands.  » 

Less durrrr, more Daniel. And Peter Eastgate is still learning his colours.

Mr. Negreanu not at his best in this one. I think he felt out-classed by Dwan’s wide open game and next-level reading ability — even when everyone was telling him he was wrong. In fact, durrrr read the hand better than the whole table even though he was in the middle of it. So Daniel decided to step up a gear and try some things himself. Not such good timing though.

His speech with against Eli was pretty stupid. And the last hand? Steam-tastic.

Looks like GSN are finally putting the full episodes back online again. On kind of a delayed release though — Pokertube’s always first so I’ll do both.

… do not talk about it. It is hard to collect spilled water.

I think that’s a perfect way of looking at our instinctive reactions to all of the shit stuff we end up going through as poker players.

Expensive bluffs, mis-clicks, coolers, outdraws — they happen. Water gets spilled and we explode into analysis mode, talking to ourselves about reasons, blame, what could’ve or should’ve happened… but didn’t, often rounding it off with the cornerstone of any experienced player’s inner monologue — “Seriously, what the fuck was that? I run so bad”.

But what if all those thoughts are just a knee-jerk reflex from our primitive monkey brain? A primitive monkey brain which insists on making the hopeless effort to un-spill the water — to try and pick it up and put it back where it came from?