Monday, October 25, 2010

Drawing practice

I last played on PokerStars on Thursday night; I stayed on an even keel and came out slightly in the black. There's nothing very exciting to report about the session, so I'll focus this post on something else.

I've always had at least a slight interest in poker, and it's never suffered a decline. It had a big uptick when I first watched Texas Hold'em on ESPN around three years ago, and from that time I can say I've been seriously hooked. Four years ago, before the uptick, I ported an open source video poker game which had been developed for Linux to Windows. One drawback it had was that it required mouse input to play. Over this last weekend, I enhanced it to take keyboard input in addition, and have used it to get some good "drawing practice" in. What I mean by that is practice at getting better at evaluating a poker hand at a glance, making it second nature to pick which cards to hold.

Five card draw and Hold'em would seem to have little in common, but one thing they do share is the poker fundamental requirement of being able to recognize the drawing potential of a hand. Of course, all poker variants share that. The less mental energy you have to expend on the fundamentals, the more you have left over for the finer points of strategy! I'll be interested to see if the drawing practice helps my play.

delta: $2,000
balance:$840,309

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