The videos I have been reviewing on Stoxpoker are produced by James “splitsuit” Sweeney. He has 2 different series that focus on ring games. I started with his first series that took me back to the basics. It was helpful in clearing some questions that I might have had, as well as helping me with ranging my opponents a bit more. I am almost done with this series and after I finish with it I will move on to his second series that is called Kiss the Ring. I have seen some changes in my game that has resulted in more winning sessions than losing sessions, and I can’t wait to see what things I will learn in the next few videos. It has really opened up my game to where I am not such a tight passive player and becoming more of a tight aggressive with some loose aggressive mixed in (which is something that I never did).
The videos have also helped me in table selection. I used to choose tables by the players per flop percentage. This is just fine but has some flaws in what tables to pick. Yes I want to get on a table with more players that see the flop because of my tighter playing style, but I also want to get onto a table with more fully stacked player rather than the short stack players. The reasoning behind this is that when you are playing against a short stack player in ring games, you are actually playing their game more than the more positive EV game that you should be playing with a full stack. So here recently I have been focusing on sitting on a table with 4-5 players that have a full buy-in or real close, and this has resulted in better sessions and better results. It is important to keep an eye on the table demographics as you play through your session to make sure you are staying in a position that is the one you want and the table doesn’t get taken over by short stacks. This type of thinking has made me consider moving up to what is called the deep tables, where you have double the normal buy-in (so $20 in $10NL rather than $10). These tables on the norm have 7-8 players at the table with $10 or more. The only concern I have is wether I should be buying in for the full amount ($20) or just buy in for my regular amount. I know that buying in for less than the full amount eventually causes me to lose EV because if I get paid off with a monster and only have $10 on the table, I could have gotten more had I put $20 on the table. I’ll have to do some research into this before I will feel comfortable with changing up the tables I play on any further.
Now the 2nd thing that has drastically helped my game is the addition of Poker CoPilot (http://pokercopilot.com/). Once again this is a program similar to Poker Tracker 3 and Hold’em Manager. It doesn’t have all the info that that these other 2 programs have, but it is the only program that can be natively ran on a Mac and its functionality is actually really nice. The support for this program is really good considering that it is basically being ran by one person. I started using the program about 30 days ago (using the free 30-day trial), and have had a few issues with it. Below you can find my pros and cons to this program, I hope it is helpful to anyone who might be considering getting the program for themselves.
Pros:
- Runs on a MAC (with development of PT3 for Mac not even started yet this is a big plus, considering most of your opponents are using either PT3 or a program similar to it).
- Updates a plenty (I think within the past 30 days I have gotten 2-3 updates to fix any bugs or to upgrade/update the program itself).
- Easy to use/setup (Was just a simple download and basically start using, as long as you have already setup to save your hands to your computer you will start benefiting on your first table, you might have to direct it to find your hand history folders, if you changed where it would be by default).
- Support is awesome, if a bug arises and is reported a fix for it is worked on quickly. Questions are answered within a day.
- If you keep the program open for numerous days, it doesn’t recognize it as being a new day and will display all the stats from pervious days (since program first opened) as being todays stats along with any stats from todays play.
- Unable to customize date range, it does have today, one week, one month, three months, six months, year to date, one year, and max.
- Your stats in the HUD show your overall stats for the day (would rather see what my stats are for that table for that session).
- No way to chart your personal VPIP in the custom charts area.
- More functionality needed for the HUD (color ranges and more stats).
Until next time,
Merch
