Harringtons Arch Nemesis?

[Karabiner]

AdamM for mod 

[AdamM]

It has been discussed on the mods board and a decision has been made to let it stay, it was borderline but the concensus was to allow it.

I didnt ask for it to be removed and I didnt say I was offended, just that it's in poor taste.

AdamM for mod 

Lol, can't see that mate

[JungleCat03]

I think the super laggy style that many scandinavian players seem to have, when played well is the best style of poker there is. Gus Hansen, Dan Negreanu, Patrik Antonius are jsut some of the LAGs who've had great success with this approach.

It needs the most amount of skill to apply well though as you are constantly in situations where you need to value bet, bluff, call and fold correctly, making lots of decisions and having to get most of them right. TAG style tends to mean you have fewer, less difficult decisions

I like being on a table of bad lags as they don't have the skill to manipulate the difficult positions they put themselves in.  Good lags are a nightmare to play though and force you to risk all, or play passively which just tends to make you fall into their hands imo.

[mex]

I don't think you can label all Scandies. We have built a stereo type around them, (i blame Gus Hansen),
most are just bad players, just if a Yank plays 56os to a 3x raise then he's a donk, a scandie does it and he's a loose agressive young gun.

Scandies play off this image,(they are all a bit mad anyway, you seen em drive or cross a road)

I know plenty of players who play poker who use loose 'run and gun tatics', like FATTAMARRA.

I hate the whoop and holla hi fiving after outdrawing people.

[MANTIS01]

Yep sorry for getting side-tracked jjandellis

I think your mentality is important when facing aggressive opponents.

By throwing chips around they will feel like they are the "table captain", and in every respect this is true. But there is nothing stopping you still feeling like the boss .

I really enjoy running into LAGs at the table. I think about the different ways I am going to trap them soon. So I still feel like I'm in charge of them so to speak.

I see lots of players get really wound up by this constant pressure and ship their stack to the LAG player by loosing their patience.

Don't forget whilst these players are involved in every hand you can be looking for all sorts of tells and information. They won't have so much info on you. So you could say that this is an advantage.

Playing loose is good at a tight table when you have established a tight image yourself. There are a lot of good tight players looking to trap out there though.

You could try playing some short-handed tournaments or some 6-handed STTs. This should improve your aggression and enable you to change gears when you return to full 10-handed affairs.

[Eyeofsauron]

*Warning - heavy-handed analogy alert*

Scandianvian poker players are the suicide plane hijackers of our age. In the 'good old days' of plane hijacks, hijackers would not perform acts which would put their own lives in danger. Killing all the passengers would be one such act. Therefore the passengers knew their best chance of survival was simply to sit there and be quiet - they didn't need to risk their own lives, as the hijackers wouldn't be risking theirs.

With suicide hijackers this is not the case - the hijackers place no value on their lives and so are willing to sacrifice them to achieve their goals. In order to save their own lives, the passengers know they will have to risk dying in order to overcome the hijackers (the United 93 scenario).

OK, so if poker players = hijackers and passengers,  and chips = the players' lives, then you can see where I'm going with this. Old school players put a high value on their chips and so are less likely to risk them to win pots. Scandies care less and so will happily risk them. If the Scandie is always risking his chips, then he's continually asking you to risk yours to stop him. If the money means more to you than him, you're going to fold as you don't want to risk going out.

On September 11th the hijackers went all-in. The passengers on the planes which hit the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon folded as they didn't realise the texture of the game had changed. The passengers on United 93 were able to identify the change in strategy and made the correct adjustment to their play. They called the all-in. Sadly for them their hands didn't stand up.

What a load of bollocks.

[JungleCat03]

I thought it was quite an imaginative analogy myself. Born of a warped, twisted mind, definitely.

But I enjoyed reading it. Andrew's posts are always imaginative and intelligent, even though he does come out with some appalling puns sometimes.

Look past the emotional outrage and there is a parallel there.

[Colchester Kev]

*Warning - heavy-handed analogy alert*

Scandianvian poker players are the suicide plane hijackers of our age. In the 'good old days' of plane hijacks, hijackers would not perform acts which would put their own lives in danger. Killing all the passengers would be one such act. Therefore the passengers knew their best chance of survival was simply to sit there and be quiet - they didn't need to risk their own lives, as the hijackers wouldn't be risking theirs.

With suicide hijackers this is not the case - the hijackers place no value on their lives and so are willing to sacrifice them to achieve their goals. In order to save their own lives, the passengers know they will have to risk dying in order to overcome the hijackers (the United 93 scenario).

OK, so if poker players = hijackers and passengers,  and chips = the players' lives, then you can see where I'm going with this. Old school players put a high value on their chips and so are less likely to risk them to win pots. Scandies care less and so will happily risk them. If the Scandie is always risking his chips, then he's continually asking you to risk yours to stop him. If the money means more to you than him, you're going to fold as you don't want to risk going out.

On September 11th the hijackers went all-in. The passengers on the planes which hit the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon folded as they didn't realise the texture of the game had changed. The passengers on United 93 were able to identify the change in strategy and made the correct adjustment to their play. They called the all-in. Sadly for them their hands didn't stand up.

What a load of bollocks.

Well, i think its safe to say that AndrewT put more thought into his analogy than you did in your reply LOL

[NoflopsHomer]

I don't think you can label all Scandies. We have built a stereo type around them, (i blame Gus Hansen),
most are just bad players, just if a Yank plays 56os to a 3x raise then he's a donk, a scandie does it and he's a loose agressive young gun.

Scandies play off this image,(they are all a bit mad anyway, you seen em drive or cross a road)

I know plenty of players who play poker who use loose 'run and gun tatics', like FATTAMARRA.

I hate the whoop and holla hi fiving after outdrawing people.

Peter Jepsen, winner of the Warsaw EPT was a comparatively tight player for a Scandie. He admitted it himself I think, in an interview.

[Eyeofsauron]

*Warning - heavy-handed analogy alert*

Scandianvian poker players are the suicide plane hijackers of our age. In the 'good old days' of plane hijacks, hijackers would not perform acts which would put their own lives in danger. Killing all the passengers would be one such act. Therefore the passengers knew their best chance of survival was simply to sit there and be quiet - they didn't need to risk their own lives, as the hijackers wouldn't be risking theirs.

With suicide hijackers this is not the case - the hijackers place no value on their lives and so are willing to sacrifice them to achieve their goals. In order to save their own lives, the passengers know they will have to risk dying in order to overcome the hijackers (the United 93 scenario).

OK, so if poker players = hijackers and passengers,  and chips = the players' lives, then you can see where I'm going with this. Old school players put a high value on their chips and so are less likely to risk them to win pots. Scandies care less and so will happily risk them. If the Scandie is always risking his chips, then he's continually asking you to risk yours to stop him. If the money means more to you than him, you're going to fold as you don't want to risk going out.

On September 11th the hijackers went all-in. The passengers on the planes which hit the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon folded as they didn't realise the texture of the game had changed. The passengers on United 93 were able to identify the change in strategy and made the correct adjustment to their play. They called the all-in. Sadly for them their hands didn't stand up.

What a load of bollocks.

Well, i think its safe to say that AndrewT put more thought into his analogy than you did in your reply LOL

I put down as much thought as it deserved!

[tikay]

I don't think you can label all Scandies. We have built a stereo type around them, (i blame Gus Hansen),
most are just bad players, just if a Yank plays 56os to a 3x raise then he's a donk, a scandie does it and he's a loose agressive young gun.

Scandies play off this image,(they are all a bit mad anyway, you seen em drive or cross a road)

I know plenty of players who play poker who use loose 'run and gun tatics', like FATTAMARRA.

I hate the whoop and holla hi fiving after outdrawing people.

...to be fair, the Scandies, on the whole, display excellent manners at the poker table, & both win & lose with dignity.

[kinboshi]

I don't think you can label all Scandies. We have built a stereo type around them, (i blame Gus Hansen),
most are just bad players, just if a Yank plays 56os to a 3x raise then he's a donk, a scandie does it and he's a loose agressive young gun.

Scandies play off this image,(they are all a bit mad anyway, you seen em drive or cross a road)

I know plenty of players who play poker who use loose 'run and gun tatics', like FATTAMARRA.

I hate the whoop and holla hi fiving after outdrawing people.

...to be fair, the Scandies, on the whole, display excellent manners at the poker table, & both win & lose with dignity.

Very pleasant people the Scandies I've played with live.  Not stand-offish or arrogant at all, pleasant conversation and a very congenial atmosphere at the table as they pillaged my stack with their raises and re-raises from any position. 

[Tragic]

When I started playing a couple of years back I had the image of poker as a game of constant bluffing and move making all new idiots do. At the same time however as I was so new to it even the 10 dollar tournament buy in had me tensed right up on the bubble which gave me the double difficulty of wasting away what I had left the few times my idiotic moves actually worked or got lucky! OVer time the moves disappeared and I came to understand the game a bit more and I think Harrington was very important with this, it is not a style I strictly adhere to and yes I do agree he advocates a very tight approach. I think however that Harrington realized this himself and was simply trying to get across the basics for his readers to build on. Alot of poker I picked up myself but it was very handy to have a book that laid out the specific thought processes that should be going through your mind *every* hand. I think Harrington is an excellent start and this was all it was intended to be. It amazes me some of the players I play with on crypto, and I won't mention any names, seem to be complete robots who will literally sit there for the first two hours of any serious MTT making no effort to accumulate chips until they pick up a massive hand. Many of them however seem to be the most successful, so maybe for online poker Harrington is largely enough.

As for the fundamentalists of poker, it really annoys me how people get so easily offended by jovial references to sensitive issues, I loved Mantis01's joke btw, the whole reason it's funny to me is that some people tend to get words mixed up with serious beliefs. Neither Andrew nor Mantis find the actual situations funny and as long as that holds there is no reason they cannot make light of the situation in a tasteful way. I'm a student an managed to blow half a terms loan in the middle of last year convinced I was pokers new best player with the worst luck in the world. Since then I've had a serious rethink about the way I played and it has helped alot. However only this year have my results become seriously "good" in comparison. The main reason I see for this? In December and January I had a couple of really big wins considering the stakes I usually play at. I would probably say the single most important factor in this rapid improvement has been that my £20 and £30 buy ins aren't a massive consideration anymore, I can change the gear from TAG to LAG at the right time, when we are on the bubble or when each position makes a huge difference in cash payout. Watching the people who are blatantly conscious of the money leak away their chips makes me realize the huge flaws in my game when I had the same problem. Last night I made the final table of the 4k on crypto and for the first time actually had the confidence to really dominate the table, I took a piece of advice from Antonio Esfandiari, I only knew what first prize was, if I went out before then so be it, but that was my goal. The scandies have it right to treat the money as numbers on a screen, as long as you don't have responsibilities it's fair enough, right?

[wsopin07]

You really need to understand all styles of play, have the ability to play all styles, and I think most important u have to adjust to the players around u at that particular time.

There is no "one" way to play or win. If someone played w/ me a year ago and sat at a table w/ me today they would not recognize my play. A poker player should always be learning, adjusting, experimenting, to try and win that one comp they are in.

The players that get "hot" are really just very confident and feel relaxed w/ the decisions they are making, they feel they will win and many times they do. When I am running good I always go w/ my gut feeling, the first thought that enters my mind.

So I think we all need a little Harrington, a little scandie, a little Ivey, a little Sklansky, (just a tiny bit of  ) a little aggressive, a little passive in your game. One style will never work over the long run and I think you should look at poker as "one very long game"

During my win at the WSOP I had great balance between aggression, starting hand selection, and the ability to understand the situations going on around me. That is how u win a big comp in my opinion.

At the 888.com where I came 2nd I just played over the top, had some good luck, but never felt that comfortable of relaxed. Just 2 examples I can think of off the top of my head.

The Rookie

[matt674]

An interesting link on the subject:

http://www.cardplayer.com/poker_magazine/archives/?a_id=427&m_id=15&PHPSESSID=4c420b2003c77c30f5bea2149896418a

posted on a thread from a while back:

http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?topic=4599.0