I want to talk about some of my traits as a player. I think I have several strengths but I have a lot of weaknesses I need to work on.
Strengths
1. I guess there are a lot of reasons for this, but by far the greatest strength I have is that I absolutely destroy terrible players. Generally speaking, if it's something like me, 5 meh regs, 1 good player and 2 whales, I'm going to stack the whales far more often than the other players. I seem to be able to get into the mindset of a terrible player (maybe because I know what it's like!) and figure out what they're doing...if they're bluffing in dumb spots or overvaluing certain hands or calling down way too light.
2. Related to 1, I generally am able to put myself into good equity spots with marginal hands by finding good squeeze spots and generally putting pressure on people who have capped ranges.
3. I think I am also good at understanding flop textures that hit various ranges and have a decent idea of when to pot control vs. when to push people off their equity.
Weaknesses
1. I still overplay far too many hands, and find myself in no-man's land in some spots.
2. I think I have serious problems with decent TAGs whose ranges are always going to be stronger than mine.
3. I pay off far too often if I think people are capable of having an occasional bluff.
4. Think I've been missing far too many spots to bluff rivers, although if I start doing this it may be a huge leak because a lot of people already slowplay big hands against me and bluff-raising rivers is always going to be dicey in my games where people are so depolarized.
I think these problems are mostly easily fixable. I want to post more hands that illustrate these spots as they come up.
One problem I had was gambling far too much with dumb hands vs. shortstacks...I think I have fixed this, and reading Jared Tendler helped. The way that Tendler categorizes the various types of tilt is brilliant. When I started reading the book, I was somewhat skeptical, as I felt I had always had a decent handle on tilt, which I felt was simply reacting badly to losing. But I realized I was definitely suffering from a form of "optimistic" tilt and have avoided anything amazingly spazzy for the past several months.
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