Small forum vs Big forum

[nawhead]

Am I limiting my growth as a poker player by just spending time on a small forum like this?

I sort of feel like I'm on the outskirts of the poker community here, like I'm on the slow track. "Wouldn't I be so much better now if I posted in one of the big training site forums?" I wonder sometimes.

But then other times I don't think it matters where I spend my time, as long as I be as honest with myself, focus, and try to absorb as much as I can, because I think there are still plenty of great players I can learn from here. And I don't get distracted by all the bs that goes on in bigger forums.

[urbansprawler]

I like pokertrikz more than 2p2, just to pick two examples. The quality of posts is far higher and big forums have a lot of bullshit.

[zomfgwtfbbq]

Originally Posted by urbansprawler

I like pokertrikz more than 2p2, just to pick two examples. The quality of posts is far higher and big forums have a lot of bullshit.

This, and that there's prolly a tighter community around here.

[Silverthunder]

It is actually pretty interesting that you brought this up. I have actually been thinking about the same concept for a couple of months.

We are in a pretty descent forum here for microstakes (but we need a few more frequent posts) & I have some loyalty to this site because of all the nice videos.

I think it is possible that at a point you could outgrow this site in skill level. But who knows; maybe the site will expand. It seems like we get a lot of hits if you look at all of the guest comments on more recent (user) videos.

What do you guys mean exactly by quality of posts? Maybe you are saying that in 2+2 with all the "thank you" and "lol" posts. Speaking of 2 + 2, have you guys seen that Chicago Joey thread 30/30.

[Trikkur]

Honestly I think you can easily spend time at both sites. Depending on how much you use the off topic forums; it should only take a few minutes to check on all the pokertrikz posts and the same at 2+2.

If you must choose 1, I don't see anything wrong with using PokerTrikz since there is less clutter among the posts. You might get 10x more responses at 2+2, but most of it doesn't add anything new to the discussion since post quality is lower.

After you start playing 200NL, I think you should consider using 2+2 more and probably look into getting a video training site subscription as well. Until then though, I like PokerTrikz

[chinz]

I prefer pokeritieto.fi (in finnish) for most of my HH questions. I really don't like 2+2 micro/smallstakes forums, because the advice in them is generally pretty bad IMO. I'd suggest lurking around on multiple forums but I'd rather use pokertrikz than 2+2 for microstakes HH questions tbh.

On the other hand, 2+2 NLHU forums are great and there's many very solid mid/highstakes players providing quality answers.


I haven't posted too much at DeucesCracked forums myself but I think there's a lot of good discussion too. (reading every post by grindcore is massively +ev imo)

[nawhead]

Thanks for the input, Trikkur!

Whew, I have your blessing to spend some of my time elsewhere! That means a lot to me. I guess I have this guilt/loyalty thing to Pokertrikz, since this is where my real poker education began. So I feel like if I'm getting better, I need to give back here first. Like I would be some kind of hit n' runner if I took from here, got better, then instaquit the site cause now I'm too good for it or something.

But to be honest, I haven't dug as deeply as I could. I haven't participated as much as I wanted to. And that's just on me.

So I want to ramp up my poker education. On here and elsewhere. I just feel personally I'm at a critical junction right now in my life where I feel really motivated to learn.

Chinz, I was thinking of Deuces Cracked also. Thanks for the suggestion.

[given1982]

Originally Posted by Trikkur

Honestly I think you can easily spend time at both sites. Depending on how much you use the off topic forums; it should only take a few minutes to check on all the pokertrikz posts and the same at 2+2.

If you must choose 1, I don't see anything wrong with using PokerTrikz since there is less clutter among the posts. You might get 10x more responses at 2+2, but most of it doesn't add anything new to the discussion since post quality is lower.

After you start playing 200NL, I think you should consider using 2+2 more and probably look into getting a video training site subscription as well. Until then though, I like PokerTrikz

+1

I haven't looked at the DC forums for a while, but I wasn't impressed the last time I did. 2+2 is by far at the top of the list of forums you should be reading outside of here.

Nawhead and Silverthunder, I would suggest posting hands on 2+2. You have some serious flaws in the way you think about the game (overthinking and seeing monsters everywhere, which leads you to take lots of FPS/weird/bad lines), and I think it will help you to hear people other than me tell you that. You need to understand all the "standard" lines to beat the microstakes before you can get to a level where you need to think that deeply about situations.

[nawhead]

Originally Posted by given1982

Nawhead and Silverthunder, I would suggest posting hands on 2+2. You have some serious flaws in the way you think about the game (overthinking and seeing monsters everywhere, which leads you to take lots of FPS/weird/bad lines), and I think it will help you to hear people other than me tell you that. You need to understand all the "standard" lines to beat the microstakes before you can get to a level where you need to think that deeply about situations.

Given, I do tend to ramble about my motivations for certain hands, but most of the time it's not a justification of it. And pretty much all the hands I post are because I have doubts about how I played it.

So, I am hearing you when you say I'm not getting value, playing scared, or fancy/spewy in lots of spots. I post the weird hands so I can hear people say it's bad. And then I also do a little devil's advocate because I hate just insta-agreeing with one word replies. I don't think it helps me either if I just blindly go along with some "standard" reply. I have to know why that line is standard in that spot.

(Yah, I'm the kid in class who likes to ask a bunch of stupid questions cause I want to know why an obvious thing is obvious. Other kids are like "wtf is wrong with that kid? What a dumbass!" )

So, I don't blame you for thinking I play really bad/backwards/weak-tight/donk-spewy all the time! I do play bad! But if I accept that and try to reason out why I'm making those bad plays (or why I'm not thinking of making a better play), then I should get better, hopefully.

[Silverthunder]

What you are saying in the HH threads is relatively straightforward- I just need to bet more. So at least it is not any kind of a difficult crazy concept. And I think I have been doing that more in my play overall (as Nawhead pointed out not everything shows up in threads)

I think the highlight so far in my poker education was learning the simple concept that you need to know what worse hands are calling you. With a lot of these villains, since a lot of them are quite unknown and since the player pool is so diverse, putting them on proper hand ranges & identifying which worse hands will call can be almost couterproductive at times.

I think that one of the things that I struggle with a little bit is this whole phylosophy of bet/fold to deal with determining the villain's hand strength. Often the stack sizes are such that the villain does not need to raise to get the stacks in by the river. Either that or they can get very close to full stacks in (ie. all but 10 BB or something) in on the river with PSB.

As Nawhead said, we do learn from the posts. It's easy to notice when we are making the same mistakes again in our posted hands but some of the points/applications from old posts did sink in.