The days of smoke-filled rooms, whiskey, cheeseburgers, and late nights are gone. I think the new-school poker players — the ones who are dominating the games today — are players who look very different. They’re younger, leaner, and more focused on improving their physical and mental health — and they’re crushing the games.
— Daniel Negreanu

For the newly released poker book Peak Performance Poker: Revolutionizing the Way You View the Game, author Travis Steffen interviewed a lot of top pros, and the preceding quote from Daniel Negreanu basically sums up in a couple of sentences what the book is all about. As someone who has always struggled with my weight and energy levels, I was quite excited when Travis approached me about the concept for this book. This was exactly the type of poker book that I had been wanting to read, and now I was in a position to have my company publish it.

Peak Performance Poker is about preparing your mind and your body to play the best poker that you can possibly play, and to play that way at all times.

Am I delusional?  You decide.
I recently bluffed off 125 big blinds and felt like I played the hand pretty well. But, of course, I know that we poker players sometimes like to justify our actions despite evidence to the contrary, so I posted the hand to receive feedback from the forum members at my site, www.InternetTexasHoldem.com. I was basically seeking the answer to a very simple but important question: Am I delusional? What do you think?

Marginal Hands
This is the fourth column in a series that highlights some of the hands discussed in the new book Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time, Volume II, by Eric “Rizen” Lynch, Jon “PearlJammer” Turner, and Jon “Apestyles” Van Fleet. In this book, each author chose one tournament, and discussed the key hands from once he made the money all the way down to heads-up play. In this column, I’ve chosen one hand from each author in which he three-bet preflop with a marginal hand.

Examples of when not to do so
This is the third column in a series that highlights some of the hands discussed in the new book Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time, Volume II, by Eric “Rizen” Lynch, Jon “PearlJammer” Turner, and Jon “Apestyles” Van Fleet. In this book, each author chose one tournament, and discussed the key hands from once he made the money all the way down to heads-up play. In this column, I’ve chosen a couple of hands from Apestyles, in which he illustrates examples of when he decided not to continuation-bet.

Evaluating some close decisions
This is the second column in a series that highlights some of the hands discussed in the new book Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time, Volume II, by Eric “Rizen” Lynch, Jon “PearlJammer” Turner, and Jon “Apestyles” Van Fleet. In this book, each author chose one tournament, and discussed the key hands from once he made the money all the way down to heads-up play. In this column, I’ve chosen a couple of hands from PearlJammer, in which he evaluates some close decisions on the button.

The situation dictates how they are played
Volume II of the Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time series by Eric “Rizen” Lynch, Jon “PearlJammer” Turner, and Jon “Apestyles” Van Fleet was recently released. In this book, each author chose one tournament, and discussed the key hands from once he made the money all the way down to heads-up play. For this column, I decided to choose some hands from Lynch’s analysis that look at different situations for playing small or medium pocket pairs.

Note that all of the hands are roughly the same, small or medium pocket pairs, but the situation changes the action significantly. In one hand, Rizen folds 7-7, and in the next, he discusses the possibility of four-betting with 6-6!

Eric “Rizen” Lynch provides a hand analysis
A few months ago, I wrote an article about how some players are misapplying expected value calculations. The column focused on a particular play of shoving a wide range of hands when playing heads up with 20 big blinds. If you do the math, you discover that pushing all in is perfect strategically: You could play with your hand faceup and it would still be profitable. That column discussed several different factors that you should consider, but one key factor is that just because a play is profitable, it doesn’t mean you should make it. You should be making the most profitable play.

I own Dimat Enterprises, which publishes poker books, and after writing that column, I was reviewing a new book that’s coming out in January, Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time, Volume II. The book has three authors — Jon “PearlJammer” Turner, Eric “Rizen” Lynch, and Jon “Apestyles” Van Fleet. Each author walks through the key hands of a tournament that he played, from the bubble through heads-up play. One of the hands from Rizen illustrates that the optimal play depends on the particular opponent you are facing, and it makes for a great follow-up to the column I wrote.

It depends on the player
I read an article recently that reconfirmed to me why playing the online Sunday major tournaments is such a good value. The author of this particular article had won a $24 satellite into a $535 event. Once the bubble broke, the author explained that he was focused on the next pay jump. His explanation was that a pay jump of $500 represented a tremendous increase in his equity, given his initial buy-in of only “$24.”

This is obviously not the best mental approach to take for a tournament. How much a tournament costs to enter and how much you have won already really shouldn’t affect your decisions. There is another way to think of tournament value. Assume that there are 100 players left in a tournament, with $100,000 remaining in the prize pool, and you have an average stack. At this point in the tournament, your stack is worth approximately $1,000 — no matter if the buy-in was $10, $100, or $500.

Important factors to consider
“You could be the 10th-best player in the world, but if you’re playing against the nine best, you’re the dog.”

I’m not sure who said that, but game selection has always been an important topic discussed by many top players and authors. The goal in poker is to maximize your earn rate, and a big part of that is selecting the right game to play in. Sometimes, dropping down a limit can be more profitable if the games are very tough at the limit you normally play, and sometimes, even jumping up a limit is advisable if the game is very, very soft.

But there hasn’t been a lot of discussion about game selection when it comes to multitable tournaments. The main reason, of course, is that you don’t know who your first nine opponents are going to be, since seating is random and then changes throughout a tournament. But there are many important factors (other than your own ability) that ultimately determine your profitability in any given tournament:

A questionable play
There is a long-standing argument in the poker world between the math guys and the instinct guys. I have always been a proponent of the math side, as every decision made in poker has an underlying mathematical foundation (whether you realize it or not). Of course, I also wrote a book called Texas Hold’em Odds and Probabilities, so I might be biased. Some instinct guys will say that you sometimes have to throw math out the window, but they are missing the point. If your instincts make you feel like your opponent is bluffing, you increase the probability that your opponent is bluffing in the mathematical calculation. If your instincts tell you that your opponent has the nuts, you increase the probability of this in the calculation. Many players don’t know that they are using math, but their instincts and experience lead them close to what the mathematical calculation would conclude.