Studying Regulars

My self-exclusion on Party ends this Friday and I’m really aching to get back into the swing of things. When I do return, I’m going to do a 3/6 NL challenge much like I did earlier in the year for 1/2. This time though my goal will be to play 50,000 hands at 5PTBB/100 (=$30,000). I’m hoping this challenge will help me to refocus and it should also hopefully give me an incentive to stay at 3/6 until I regain some confidence and pad my bankroll after last month’s hit. Without it, I think I’d be too tempted to jump right back into 5/10 and that probably isn’t a particularly good idea right now.

During my break, I haven’t been able to watch nearly as many videos as I would’ve liked. Some of this is due to generally laziness, but mostly I’ve simply been too busy with assessments. I have however spent quite some time analysing the hand histories of other regulars which is not something I’ve done much of before. I was mainly looking to learn from the biggest winning regulars, trying to see what sort of lines they took, how they played in 3-bet pots, how often they bluff-raised, etc. It was really instructive and, although the majority of hands were quite standard, now and then you’d see a play or line that you’d never ever consider yourself. It was really eye-opening and I hope I’ll be able to incorporate some of the things I learnt into my own game. I also for the first time began to see some tendencies that I think could readily be exploited in the future. One regular, for example, on non-Ace flops, always checked any hand with showdown value as the preflop raiser out of position in a 3-bet pot; if he bet it was almost always a bluff (he did balance on Ace-high flops though). Another regular always shoved any pair if there was a squeeze and the original raiser folded. And another regular yet would defend any suited connector to a 3-bet but then play very straightforwardly postflop. These are the sorts of tendencies that you might suspect while playing live, but without seeing them back to back for an hour in a hand replayer you never really feel confident enough in them to consider them a ‘read’ and go with them. Hopefully now with stronger confidence in my reads I’ll be able to act upon them and convert them into dollars.