Caro's book of Tells, and a ramble

I can only imagine how fast bonuses must be cleared by higher stakes players. But for me, it still takes hours and hours of quad tabling NL25 for that $20. If I was playing higher stakes though, I suppose $20 wouldn't mean quite as much. Either way, I cleared my third $20 bonus today (of which I get 10 off of my $200 deposit).

Clearing a bonus is always a good mood lifter. You can be having a bad session and clear a bonus, and suddenly you're out of the red and into the black (if only technically)

My session today was fairly standard, in that I found little I wondered about as I played. That's not to say that I played perfectly; far from it, but I had justification in my head about all bets and bet sizes, and never just click without thinking anymore. (Barring one mouse error which cost me about $10).

I also made an interesting discovery today: I borrowed a book from a friend who has always been a wild (and bad) poker player. "Caro's book of Poker Tells" was the title. At first I was skeptical. First off, I'm an internet player other than the local home-games formed by college kids for low stakes (Generally NL10), and therefore don't have much use for physical tells. Secondly, I have always been wary of books preaching to be the "psychological guide" to poker, as most of them just sound like fluff. Who knows, maybe I'm just not at a level where their advanced psychoanalysis makes sense, but to me it just sounds like bullshit.

However on opening the book, the first line changed all my thoughts about it: "Once you've mastered the basic elements of a winning poker formula, psychology becomes the key ingredient in seperating break-even players from players who win consistently". What a disclaimer! It basically states that this entire book requires that you have "mastered the basic elements of a winning poker formula". If novices took this disclaimer at face value, none of them would buy this book. And thus I can somewhat see how my friend is such a wild player, as he most likely lacks the mathematics behind ABC poker, and is playing entirely on tells. I did end up reading the book, and found it very interesting and potentially useful (we'll see at my next live game...). I am not bashing its quality in any way, but I do want to say that this book is a DEATHTRAP for novices like myself. I feel like I should go with math 95% of the time and my people reading skills 5% of the time at this point. Technically a perfect player would be going on their tells 100% of the time, as they would always be right. I wonder if the math % continues to decrease and reading % increase as you increase in skill with live poker?

Anyways, I got a little off topic, but my session was good and I cleared a bonus, so I'm in a good mood.


Session: +$50 -- 661 Hands
Overall: $438.15 -- +$183.20 -- 5672 hands