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I really loved this book! What a woman. I know she had the help of Erik Seidel, but to come from total zero knowledge about poker to winning over $100,000 in a year is astonishing. I hope she is still playing and winning. The book itself was riveting in parts. The parts where she talks about learning and playing poker, talking about hands and strategies and apps. However, there was way too much talk about psychology in general. I know it's her background, and also her poker angle, but there was just huge swathes of it that I felt bogged down in sometimes. Nevertheless a true story of a real life heroine.
Here are some useful things I picked up from the book :
"The observed differences in ROI's (return on investment) are highly statistically significant and far larger in magnitude (in professional poker players) than those observed in financial markets where fees charged by the money managers viewed as being most talented can run as high as 3% of assets under management and 30% of annual returns."
It's easy to have an illusion of skill when you're not immediately called out on it through feedback. Poker rids you of the habit in a way nothing else quite does - and in so doing, it improves decision far afield from the game itself. Poker is exactly like life, but with instant karma.
"Until you go through a month of everything going wrong, you won't know whether you have what it takes. You will never learn how to play good poker if you get lucky - it's as simple as that." - Dan Harrington.
If there's a possible straight or flush on board, it's more likely someone is bluffing on the end. And it can also be a good spot for bluffing yourself.
Challenge yourself to be active. To raise. To check-raise. To three bet. It's easy to reach competency but to reach mastery you will have to go out of your comfort zone.
Practice embodied cognition : embody the feeling you want to express, and your mind and body will often fall into alignment. Or : fake it until you make it!
"One must never forget whether bad luck may not after all turn out to be good luck...One must never forget when misfortunes come that it is quite possible they are saving one from something much worse; or that when you make some great mistake, it may very easily serve you better than the best-advised decision" - Winston Churchill.
You want to make sure you're not the person in the poker room saying, "Can you believe what happened?" That's the other people. Don't tell bad beat stories!
Even terrible players make the plays they make for a reason. Don't berate them, even in your head, by thinking what an awful play they've made. Just try to figure out the why behind it.
A good question to ask an opponent when you have a big decision : "Are you really doing that with top pair?" and see what his reaction is.
"When you're at the table, the amount of focus that you can generate is really rewarded. Pay close attention. You're more likely to pick up patterns in betting, tells and things like that. There's so much happening." - Erik Seidel.
This is the crazy thing about modern poker : even top players are sitting there, on their phones, and they're missing all the information that's on the table. It's really kind of funny.
If you're holding blockers to your opponents' value hands, bluff away.
At the same time, you want to "unblock" their bluffs - that is, not hold any cards that interact with the hands they may fold. For example if there are two diamonds on board, it's better to have no diamonds in your hand, as it increases the probability that they have a busted flush.
Blockers improve your probabilities but they are still far from certain. You should read the player as well, not only make the GTO play.
Tai chi qigong - Tai chi means energy movement, and qigong means (energy) pulsation. It's just mostly standing form, just movements. The idea is, you're letting your body freely flow in such a way that each movement is determined by the previous movement. So it can be an endless flow, continuous movements where the functionalities remain.
CAPPED RANGE : When there is a limit to an opponent's hand strength due to the way a hand has been played. For example, if we know a player will 3-bet AA preflop he is "capped" at middle set on an AQ3 board.
"Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been born here in your place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here." - Richard Dawkins.
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