SimplifyPoker.com

 Barry and I just launched our new sitehttps://simplifypoker.comYou can sign up to our free newsletter there and find lots of free stuff.Who is the guy in small print on all your books?Barry Carter is a writer and certainly not a professional poker player. He is the editor of PokerStrategy.com and co-authored the best-selling Mental Game of Poker with Jared Tendler. He approached Dara about possibly writing a book on satellites, given Dara was widely considered the authority on the format.The...

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Tournament Poker Study Simplified explained

 Barry and I just released Tournament Poker Study Simplified. It's a new video course which breaks down the fundamentals of poker while also giving you a framework for how to study poker on your own, without a coach.Since I started writing books, demand for my one-on-one coaching has skyrocketed, so much so that I often have to turn away a lot of potential new clients. Whatever level they are, I always like to start with the fundamentals: GTO, exploits and ICM. What I often find after...

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The most important spots to study

 Many of my students don’t quite know how to study on their own, but an equally big issue for them and most poker players is knowing what to study. There is so much information out there that parsing out the most important lessons for your own game is a minefield. The biggest mistake you can make is to study the cooler type hands that lead to the biggest pots. Aces vs Kings, or set over set, feel important but in reality they play themselves. In terms of technical study, it’s much...

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Monotone flops

 Monotone flops give my students the biggest headaches, and rightfully so, they are perhaps the trickiest boards to play in poker. Some broad characteristics I have identified about monotone flops are:There is no leading from the BBBet sizes go downThere is much more checkingMost hands mixTo simplify, monotone flops see us play poker "with the handbrake on" where we take less aggressive actions, build the pot less, and largely try to get to showdown more. Why do we play more timidly...

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Why you should study Ace high flops

I am a big advocate of studying the most common spots in poker, which for the most part I mean things like Button vs Big Blind, Small Blind vs Big Blind, etc. What that also means is studying the most common flop types. Wet flops, dry flops, paired flops, monotone flops, etc. The most common flop type of all being Ace high flops.  A lot of people say things like "Whenever I have KK an Ace always flops", to suggest they are unlucky. The reality is that it should happen a lot of the...

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How to study poker

In the last few years, I have been inundated with new students. They come to me for an array of reasons, but when you boil it down they are all looking for a framework for studying poker on their own. It can be overwhelming to know what to study and how to study the game. I have been working on a major project with Barry where we address this head-on, but until then here is a simple cheat sheet I use to study a hand in a solver like GTO Wizard:Look at the preflop ranges first: Before heading...

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Irish Open and other threads

 In the run up to Irish Opens in recent years, I’ve taken to reposting one old Irish Open blog a day in chronological order. I noticed a few years missing, and my first thought was“Hmmm. That’s weird. I guess nothing interesting happened at the Irish Open that year for me personally”However, I just realised the reality is different. The missing years were the first years I was sponsored, and as part of the deal my blogs were moved to the sponsor’s site, or newsletters. These are now defunct,...

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