Roll The Tape

I've been pretty busy lately, with work travel, design reviews, car breakdowns, and all kinds of little projects and honey-do's keeping me on the go. My time at the poker tables has suffered as a result; I've only played about 100 hands per day on average on 'Tilt, and about the same on 'Stars. The good news is that I'm mostly winning at both sites, and in fact I've nearly doubled my somewhat meager bankroll on 'Stars in just a week of play by aggressively attacking the low-dollar regular cash games ($10NL) there, and scoring at some low-dollar SnGs, too.

Besides the aforementioned life stuff, the other big time sink for me lately has been the production of my first poker training video. I knew it was going to be a tough learning curve to put together this thing, but I really had no idea just how steep the climb would be. Just mastering the screen capture software (Camtasia) and the audio capture program (Audacity) have been really challenging. Poor documentation, confusing forum advice, buggy software, countless operator error issues... you name it, I've been through it. Then add in the fact that my ability to talk coherently and clearly "on tape" is totally lacking, plus my "artistic" abilities are a joke, and you have the recipe for a very slow, very inefficient production process. Oh, and don't forget that I actually had to research the video topic (Position), script out a lesson, create powerpoint templates, and then record and produce the whole thing. Believe it or not, I think I spent over 40 hours of time going from basic idea to finished product-- which is just a 50-minute video. Boy, am I slow or what?

The video itself is part-1 of a 2-part lecture on Position For Beginners. It definitely still has a few technical issues, and I really need to work on my speaking voice and a few formatting issues with powerpoint, but overall the video is not horrible. Not perfect, by any matter of means, but not horrible, either. I have to say, too, that the process has, as expected, been highly educational. Besides just learning all the new software and a whole new vocabulary associated with videos and movie making, I've also learned a few things about poker and position that I sort of knew before, but didn't really fully "get." Like I've said before, the best way to really learn something is to teach it to someone else-- and this really is the reason I'm subjecting myself to to the Herculean task of this project.

The video itself has three basic chapters. The first part is a brief discussion of how money flows at a poker table, along with a PT3 stats example of one month's worth of cash results that show the distribution of winnings vs. position. The second part is a short discussion of some of the terminology associated with position, including seat names, relative vs. absolute position, and what it means to "have position" on someone else. The third part of the lecture is the real meat of the video. It's where I go into some examples on how and why playing a positionally-aware game is so important. I highlight five basic areas where position gives you such an edge at the table: Information, Pot Control, Stealing, Bluffing, and Isolation. (In the second video installment on this topic of Position, I intend to provide some basic tactics, strategies, and rules of thumb to remember when playing, and then I will finish with a ~30 minute live "sweat" session of play at a low-stakes, full ring table with an emphasis on playing position poker.)

All in all, I've had a ton of fun creating the video, but like I said, I had no real idea now much work is involved in creating even a modestly professional looking vid. Hopefully, the next one will go a bit faster, as I can just focus on preparing the content, and not so much on learning the movie making business.

Gotta run.... I've got to write a report for work that was due last Friday. Yikes!

All-in for now...
-Bug