Poker is everywhere these days. Blogs are everywhere these days. It is inevitable that we will have poker blogs. Just about every micro grinder with aspirations of ever playing in Bobby's Room has made their own blog about poker, mainly NLHE. This blog is not of the standard bankroll challenge variety, but is intended to be a hybrid of solid strategy, inspiring stories, and well, the bankroll challenge :).
Before I write my first "real" blog spot, I think it's only right for me to introduce myself. I am Raphael John, a .01/.02 NL grinder on Pokerstars under the name urbansprawle (they couldn't fit the r at the end of the name) and urbansprawler on twoplustwo.com. My SNG/MTT record is pretty poor; although most of this can be directly attributable to the small sample size, I will admit I am far better at cash games than I at tournaments. 3 months ago, I deposited $75 on full tilt and blew it all. After reading some poker articles from kingcobrapoker, I redeposited $37 on pokerstars and, 50k hands later, have $101. That said, I know how hard it is for losing poker players when they start out. Even with all of the learning tools and books out there, it's difficult to sift through the absolute nonsense and the actual good stuff. When I was starting out, kingcobrapoker helped instill some good concepts in me that have fueled my partial success. This blog will demonstrate that the kingcobrapoker methods are effective and will also serve as an extension of the website.
On this blog, I will post interesting hands from the day as well as feedback I have received on various forums and will talk strategy sometimes. If a big tournament has just played out, or something big is going on in the poker world, I will talk about this as well and I hope you, the reader, can take away a decent amount of information from this site.
First and foremost, even before I talk about any poker, I must recommend to anyone serious about poker to purchase either Pokertracker 3 or Hold Em Manager. I personally use the latter, but unfortunately it only works for NLHE and not the other games I often play, so if you are a mixed game player, pokertracker is the better choice. However, if you will focus mainly on Hold Em, HEM is the way to go as it is a bit more powerful than PT3 and also a little cheaper. A lot of people will read this and disregard this as advertising and will think they can pull of stellar reads without the programs. I was once one of these myself and, for one or two tables, a good player will most likely be able to do this, but when you're playing 12 tables at once like me, some kind of tracking software is not an option, it's an absolute must. Some of the advantages of this are:
1) Less effort remembering people's actions, thus allowing you to use valuable time for difficult decision.
2) Better hand history recall. Odds are you won't recall most hands you've played with someone from over a week ago. A program will.
3) Allows you fine-tune your game. The program will provide you with easy-to-use and highly complex statistics to tweak the percentages of whatever you do (cbet, double-barrel, etc.) to increase your overall profitability and also provide some nice-looking graphs ^_^.
That's it for now. My next post will be a glossary of poker terms I will often use. Good luck at the tables!