me
Well, who am I?
No one special, at least until November 9th/10th that is ;-)
I am ancient, born in 1953, croupier during the 1970's which included dealing 7 card stud - but I never understood (or even had an interest in) the game.
Discovered texas holdem nolimit in a Bolton Casino a couple of years ago. I entered the 100 player tournament, chip leader much of the time, made final table and should have won but came third when I did not appreciate that opponents could also have flush cards at the same time as me. In fact, I played this whole tournament without realizing that flushes were not unusal - I therefore over played/overbet/underbet many hands and was obviously very lucky.
Soon after I managed to pick up a few thousand online, +11K at my high point ... then the bad news ... I read books and articles and discovered Gap theory ... then I started losing :-( Apparently my expectations of always being in the money were not realistic (though i continued with about a 50% success rate in Bolton in low level entry tournaments). My online bank roll drained away over the last couple of years. Paid full entry into EPT Amsterdam 2006 and built a nice stack, blew it by getting greedy with a boat, came up against (an obvious) higher boat,
So, for preparation for WSOP, I will read (and reread) the standard bibles including the book of tells, but I have at least learnt not to rely on them and try to play my own game. I much enjoy face-to-face poker rather than online.
Major weakness ... boredom and lack of patience when I have a long run of poor cards resulting in lack of outstanding success, lack of memory for names.
Major strengths ... positive attitude, great memory for previous hands/betting played (maybe my chess experiences help that)
Cheers,
D
