gboro780 Well on pocketfives.com (5.000.000$ on online MTT)

1.

Originally Posted by Akeshish 

Thanks for doing this. What is your thought process in a hand. How do you know when and how much to go for value in a hand, flop, turn, river. If your not sure on a range to put a player on how do you proceed. Kind of a general ? about some insight will be great. Thanks.

kinda vague, there are a lot of things going on, but i can think of 3 major ones. first i want to identify the villain. do i know him, is he a reg, a random, a fish? this can often affect the best way to play the hand... like if you have QJcc and a good tricky reg limps, you may limp along. but if a fish limps you should probably be raising it up.

the second would be generalizations. you put them in a group, now you want to have a good idea of how this person should play, how they should perceive you. you could even go deeper into different kinds of fish, different kind of regs... like the guy you recognize from 2p2 who is probably shove happy or the guy you remember seeing in the big tourneys back when you were coming up who still plays like its 1994. this is most related to playing poker and experience. you just have to grind hands and get a good feeling for how certain people tend to play and things like how they react to aggression.

the third would be history. in a lot of the games i play you know half your table these days so having a good memory of who you have and have not gotten out of line against is clutch of course. also i think a lot of players just ignore the table if they aren't in the hand which is really bad.

one tip would be when you have free time click the hand history and go back and look at the last couple big hands so you know what's been going on while you were 8 tabling

2.

Originally Posted by El_Tiburon 

If you were to start all over at your most basic of poker experience and understanding w/ a $500 bankroll and a month to dedicate to learning the game....

What books/training sites/online sites or games would you invest your time and money in to get to winning money and crushing MTT

the best way to learn is by putting in the time. training sites are great but theres no subsitute for experience and the thousands of hands you see. before the days of training sites you would just pull up the great players and try to study what they were doing. i remember pulling up guys like bax, foshio, actionjeff in the 100r and going over the hands they'd show down

3.

Originally Posted by fly44 

What is your story? (it would help to know to come up with good questions)

i started playing poker about 5 years ago. a guy i lived with in the dorms was always playing on party so i gave him $50 for a transfer to check it out. i lost it quickly playing sngs and got antoher $50 a few days later. lost that too. the third or fourth transfer was the last time i've had to get money online.

probably like 6-8 months after this time i remember taking 2nd in a step tournament for around 2k which was huge for me at the time. i put some money on stars and started playing the 10 rebuys on there where i got killed. these guys were playing a way different game. i eventually started playing omaha mtt's cause they were the only thing i could beat on stars.

then i found this site and really started thinking about the game and the mistakes i was making. this is when my game took off. i did a tlb bet on here when i had maybe a 25k roll but just wanted motivation to play a lot. im pretty sure i took 2nd in the bet to gbmantis but had my two biggest wins that month in the stars 100 and 10rebuy , nearly doubled my roll and felt great at the time.

now that i had money i had to give some back. i remember a tournament on paradise pokercalled the saltwater which was a $250 freezeout at night with like 40 people. but half the 40 people were the guys i looked up to on the p5s rankings. in these days that meant rizen bax sheets soupie etc . i played it as much as i could over the next few months and was definitely a donator but learned a lot about the right style to play and the things i wasn't doing enough of.

for the next few years i grinded the mid and high stakes tournaments and was able to beat them pretty consistently but never with any big scores. i rmeember thedean and i always talking about those elusive 5 figure scores and how we would run good in the small tourneys and like dog ass in the big ones. i think i had something stupid like over a million in cashes without a score over 25k and started to get pretty frustrated. i remember staying with ajk for bellagio and watching him win the stars 300 for another 50 ball and being like wow what am i doing wrong.

i went to foxwoods around this time after limited success in live tourneys up to that point. my heart would beat outta my chest anytime i was in a hand. i was a mess. but they were having the wpt event and a bunch of prelims so i headed up there. i got lucky enough to final table the 3k there along with bax, mrtimcaum, tenthplanet, chris mccormack and a few others. luckily this crazy old guy art decided to just be a wrecking ball and take everyone out, leaving us 3 handed to talk chop. he had all the chips but was willing to give a bunch of money to me and chris to split up. this left us with 101k each which i agreed to and was by far my biggest win.

man this could go on forever so im just gonna sum it up here. around this time the games online started to change, they were getting much tougher. before this period i was pretty tight and solid and just wanted to avoid making any mistakes (now i know that if you're not making any mistakes then you're probably not putting yourself out there enough). but with the way the field had improved, tight and solid wasn't gonna work the way it used to. i started experimenting with things and changed my style a bit. this combined with much better tourney schedules now has led to bigger scores and thats where we're at today

4.

Originally Posted by 7DeLuX 

1. Do you think playing on certain days/times is more beneficial then other days/times for w/e reason excluding obv sunday. I mean more during the week. If so why/why not.
(ie do you think its better to play during the day/night/late night est. idk if im wording this right but ive thought about it on multiple occasions)

the afternoon and late night tourneys are definitely the softest but the money isn't as enticing. like the daytime 100r on stars is ridiculously soft. but even though the quality of play is so much better i still prefer the late night one where you can win 30k.

2. Do you ever feel "trapped" into doing this with all of you success
no

3. When you first started to get some recognition and becoming more known what was the hardest part and what was the biggest part of your continued success

the hardest part about being recognized is getting shoved on light for absolutely no reason. obviously it can help too but you have to have the hand : ) more often than not im just raise/folding and cursing at the computer.

biggest part of staying at the top is being honest with yourself. some people have a lot of pride and never like to admit they were wrong. i'm probably on the other end of the spectrum because im constantly beating myself up for tourney bustouts but i know in the end it helps me get better.

5.

Originally Posted by leftygrove 

Hey gboro, thanks for doing this. Hopefully you'll still be answering questions after I post this.

1) What are, in your opinion, the biggest differences between the top ranked players and the solid regulars? (by solid regs, I mean people still making a living grinding the game at high stakes, but not making huge amounts of money)

they know how the solid regulars are playing and thinking (usually because they used to be one themselves).

2) How many tables do you play? How many would you recommend people play?

4 or 5 usually. whatever you feel most comfortable with.

3) How have your experiences been in cash games and SnG's?

very limited in both, i like to play heads up sngs but i'm not really up or down much in them.

6.

Originally Posted by secretscar 

anyway, what would be the best way to reach out for poker help, strategy on a personal level like many of the top ranked players have; when you live in a tiny town, and don't have a bankroll and can't play live events it seems very hard to reach out to ppl. sorry for kinda weird question, but curious?

reading the forums and watching the best players. maybe the red pro forum on pokerroad because its such a high amount of good content.

7.

Originally Posted by bigwillie20 

big fan of you here btw,

What advice could u give to a low stakes player trying to break through in regards to the play at the low limits where the risk/reward barrier is very high? Is it better to build up a roll playing SNG and play bigger MTT or stick to the smaller MTT and hope to eventually bink a decent score

i'd say get good at the small mtts before you start playing the big ones.