Writer's (Un)Block: Position

The biggest problem I have with my new columnist gig at Learn.PokerNews.com is deciding what to write about. No, I don’t mean I lack for ideas; au contraire mes amis. If anything, I have a glut of interesting topics and ideas. Picking and choosing where to start is actually kind of challenging, and I can honestly say I lost a little sleep in the last few days trying to figure out what might be the right place to begin.

So what did I decide for my first official article? Well, when in doubt, go back to the basics. The Learn website is focused on educating beginning and entry-level poker players, so why not start with a fundamental “beginning” concept? And right down there on the bottom rung of my Pyramid of Poker Skills is one of the most important of all concepts in poker: Position.

Yep, it’s old hat for intermediate and advanced players, but learning to play a positionally-aware game is key to learning to win. If you fail to master this, you will fail to make money at poker. Period. Yes, this is true. And, no, I’m not overstating it. Here’s a little graph I’m going to include in my article to hammer home the point:

I took this data from my last 10,000 hands of $100NL and $200NL played online: If this doesn’t convince you of the power of position, I really don’t know what would….

Anyway, I’ll let you know when the first article comes out in early November. And don’t worry; I’m going to keep posting here on the blog as usual. Turns out I have more than enough ideas for both my blog and Learn…

All-in for now…
-Bug

The Opposite of Writer's Block

This is a little hard for me to believe, but I realized this week that I started writing to this blog over five years ago. Wow, half a decade. How time flies....

Over this five year period, the readership of this blog has grown steadily from about 20 people visiting the site per month, to now between 150 and 300 unique visitors every single day. That's a 200-fold increase in readership. I'm thrilled with this of course, but as I’ve mentioned before in other posts, my intention for writing to this blog has never been to add readers for the sake of, well, adding readers. My intention has been to help me with my poker. Simply trying to explain a concept or describe a hand to a generic "someone" reading this blog has helped improve my own game immeasurably. I learned a long time ago that the best way to learn something was to teach it to someone else. So I've (mostly) treated this blog as a way to teach myself a number of concepts in poker.

Has it been successful?

I believe the answer is yes, definitely. From understanding basic, fundamental gambling concepts such as edge and equity, to mastering specific poker tactics and strategies such as bet-folding and delayed c-betting, to the development of my own unique ways to think about and work through the play of a hand (i.e., REDi), this blog has unquestionably helped me lay a foundation and then build a body of poker knowledge that wouldn't (in fact, couldn't) have happened without the blog....

....so where do I go from here? Now that five years has passed, what's the next five hold in store for this blog? What's left to write about? Do I know enough about poker to now stop blogging? Have I run out of ideas to post on? Do I have blog-writer's block?

Seriously? Are you kidding me? The more I peel back the layers of hold'em, the more things I realize I don't know. The deeper I dig, the richer the vein or poker ore I uncover. If anything, I have the opposite of writers block. In fact, many times that I sit down to bang out a blog I have too many choices to pick from.

The funny thing is that this can actually cause a “block” of sorts, but a non-traditional one; i.e., I don’t know which idea to cover, so I sometimes get into ping-pong mode, where I go back and forth for a while before settling on one to tackle. Today, for instance, I alternately considered writing about stack-to-pot ratios, the notion of leaks, or the building blocks of hand reading. Alternatively, I could have written about what constitutes a "line" in poker, or what it means to maximize EV. I could also have written about non-technical topics, such as Pokerstars new "Zoom" poker, or the latest rumors about Full Tilt's on-again/off-again buy-out by GBT. Or I could have posted a specific hand I played in the last couple of days (there were at least three hands that were interesting and/or informative), or I could have chosen from a half-dozen reader's emails I received over the past week to comment on. Or....

...well, the list goes on. Said another way, the problem I have isn't one of writer's block. Instead, it's the opposite. I have too many topics to continue to research and write about. How many topics is this? Well, I figure I have at least five more years of stuff to cover...

All-in for now…
-Bug