[johnf]

I recently picked up Super System by Doyle Brunson (AKA Dolly). I read the no limit sections and Dolly’s intro chapter.
What especially interested me and surprised me, was his sections on playing little connectors. Being a limit player most of my poker life I have never thought much of small cards, I just considered it a pain in the ass to have to look at them and go through all that trouble of sending them to the muck. And assumed logically that I was ahead of the fish like Dolly who were playing that crap. But Dollies no fish, and so somewhere my predicate and subject are not adding up to be logical with that assumption about fishes and small cards.
But I sat down today in a little NLHE online and started messing with these things. It was a lot of fun and really very profitable. I won my biggest hand with a 5-6, he just had to call. I won my second biggest hand with a 6-4, again the other player just had to call the big bet because the board was not threatening and it looked like a bluff. Dolly essentially says that when you play a hand, the potential exists to get all of a players money in NLHE and that means that relative stack sizes is a big variable. This essentially means that the smaller the investment is to see a flop compared to the possible win the more hands become playable. If for extreme example you both have ten thousand on the table and the blind are 1 and 2 dollars, almost any hand becomes playable because any one two dollar call has the potential to make you ten thousand. I guess you might call this potential implied odd or maybe imaginative inferred odds.
But the downside to all this is that I screwed up my NLHE tournament play trying a few of the things I read about. It was not by design, I just kept having these stupid thoughts that put me chips at risk and made to many silly calls that chipped away at me. I really need to get my head back on with the tournaments, I will sleep on it and be OK tomorrow, well as soon as I get more money into my account, ahem.
But, the question that comes to mind is how the hell do you beat Dolly and if you can figure that out will you still be able to beat anybody else? It’s like trying to topple a mountain I think. Metaphorically speaking you go charging at the weakest point, the very tip of the peak, only to knock it down a little and then go bouncing off and tumbling to your death.
What I love most about poker books is that lots of people read them and start playing by the book. But the more people that play by the book the closer in fact the game is going to be to zero sum. So when you read a very popular book like Dolly’s, you should not be thinking so much of playing by the book but of beating players that are playing by the book. I want to share with you that since Super System came out in reprint it has been the top selling poker book at Amazon. The two other top books are Sklansky’s Theory of Poker and S&M’s Hold-em for Advanced Players. These are the books people are playing by. If we really want to beat poker we need to figure out how to beat the players that are playing by the books, and understand the books so we can also beat everyone else.
So you are in a game with Dolly, you look down and have A-A, the flop is A-4-5. You bet and dolly calls, The turn is a nine, you bet again and Dolly raises you all in. He has the wheel, how do you beat dolly? How much do you need to raise with aces to take him off the hand before the flop when the blind is $5.00 and you both have 10,000 on the table, how much if you both have a hundred thousand? And do you want to raise that much to beat him five bucks?