By Adanthar on April 2nd, 2007 (more posts by author)

Hello, everyone. I am a new writer here at Tworags and would like to introduce myself. My online nickname is Adanthar; I am a high stakes online tournament player and also play 5/10 to 10/20 NL. In between my day job as a non-profit lawyer, I've more or less been playing for a living since 2005.

For my first column, I'd like to talk about what I plan to do at Tworags. I firmly believe that the best way to get better is to analyze hands, and that's exactly what I do - I probably think about poker and post about it more than I play (which says as much about my work ethic as it does about my analytical skills, but never mind that.) Most mediocre to decent, but not great players do think about their borderline hands and try to avoid basic mistakes, but a lot of them take certain more basic poker "tenets" for granted. For example, they will never fold KK preflop because "the times you get KK vs. AA and AA vs. KK even out", they'll often slowplay the nuts no matter what the board looks like (or, vice versa, never slowplay the nuts regardless), and so on. The bottom line for many of these players is that they make big calls and big folds because "it's what you're supposed to do" and never think about the other player's hand range, what the other player expects from them, or the overall situation. In midstakes and high stakes no limit against good, thinking opponents, these mistakes are often more damaging than 90% of the marginal hands usually posted in places such as 2+2.

In the near future, I will try to post many examples of such hands and attempt to explain why they are more critical to your development as a player than most people would expect. In the meantime, I'd like to point our readers towards a new Bluff Magazine column written by Phil Galfond. In this column, he introduces a concept known as 'G-bucks' - basically, Sklansky dollars, but taken for your entire hand range as opposed to just the hand you actually have at the moment. This is a crucial part of what I'll be talking about over the next few weeks, and I encourage everyone reading this to stop and read that column - it's a great read.

Thanks for reading - hope to see you back at Tworags soon.