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June 30 — Sometimes the second-largest game in the room is the best

One of the advantages of living in Los Angeles and playing poker is the bevy of games and casinos to choose from. The recreational player pool is absolutely massive and there is a long history of playing cards throughout the state. This has allowed for many casinos to thrive, but one has really separated itself from the rest, the Commerce Casino.

If you have never been to the Commerce, you should really make it a point to take a trip at least once in your lifetime. For a poker player, it is the mecca of all card rooms, a real site to see. The poker is laid out in two different areas, the “low section” and the “top section,” or hotel area. This creates a very interesting dynamic for table selection amongst games especially in the no-limit sections. You see, the $5-$10, $1,500 cap no-limit game, the game that I play 90 percent of the time, is in the low section and the $10-$20 uncapped game is in the hotel area. So it is not easy to hop in between the two.

You literally have to walk about 100 yards from one side of the room to the other to check the other game out. This means that a lot of the good $10-$20 regulars never go down and play $5-$10. This creates a void of very strong players at $5-$10 and below. For some of these higher stakes regs, they never move partly out of laziness and partly out of not wanting to be seen playing lower. It creates a common situation where the second-largest game in the room is one of the best.

This also occurs at the $10-$20 game at the Commerce, when they rarely open a bigger no-limit game, such as $20-$40. This concept is not unique to the Commerce, as it applies to any casino. If your hometown club spreads $5-$10 as its largest game, then naturally some of the toughest players will be playing that game and the $2-$5 may be a really good place to make easy money. Obviously there are times when the biggest game in the room can and will be the most profitable, but poker really is not about ego—it is about making the most amount of money with the least amount of resistance. And sometimes you will find that the perfect fit for that formula is the second-biggest game in the room devoid of all of the good players battling it out against each other.

July 5 — Electronics at the table can really hurt your poker game

Back in the beginning of 2012, I went on one of my worst down swings in my poker career. For what seemed like months, I just could not put together a solid streak of winning sessions. I have always had the luxury of supplementing my income in other ways besides only playing poker, but these other ventures do not allow me to play as many hours as other full time players. This means that, over a period of months, my results could be more extreme or variant as I may play less overall hours than others.

In March of 2012 I decided that I was really going to bear down and play a full three months straight and really examine my play. One of the first things that I decided to do was to not use my smart phone at all at the table. I literally left it in my car and only went out to check it for emergencies every few hours when I took a break from the table. The difference in my game was absolutely amazing. I found that I was able to concentrate so much more and that I was no longer playing on autopilot. I was actively paying attention to the other players, watching showdowns, and learning about my opponents’ tendencies constantly. I also noticed that most of my opponents were not paying attention because they were fooling around with their electronic devices.

During this three-month period I had my best winning streak by far, ever. This was after playing professionally for almost seven years, including the glory days of no-limit back in 2005-2007. The fact that I put the phone down was a monumental change in my game. Flip forward about a year after that and I saw a few really good players whose games I respected a lot crumble because they were so addicted to playing open face Chinese poker on their iPads and iPhones at the table. Some guys literally never looked up from their devices unless they were involved with a hand and, in some extreme situations, would only look up when it was their turn to act! They lost so much information because they were so involved with playing open-face Chinese poker, it was absolutely ridiculous.

You have to be entirely honest with yourself and ask how much time are you spending fooling around with electronics at the table? How much better off would you be if you put all of the distractions away? I think a really good exercise would be to challenge yourself for a week and concentrate solely on the game. Compare that week’s results, your overall performance, and how you think that you played during that hyper-concentration period to the time before. If you feel like your performance was greatly enhanced, it is time to put the electronics away. Poker is a game of incomplete information. And the best live players capitalize on all of the information that is available to them. That may include tells, people preloading their chips, certain nervous tics, and so on. When you are not paying attention, and specifically when you are distracted by electronics at the table, you miss out on all of the nuisances that make you a great poker player. ♠

Follow Bart for daily strategy tips on Twitter @CrushLivePoker and @BartHanson. Check out his poker training site exclusively made for live cash game play at CrushLivePoker.com where he produces weekly podcasts and live training videos.