REVIEW: Lessons with Herschel -Chipping up...

[Invigilator]

I participated in a group lesson with TPF member HerschelW earlier this evening. The focus of this group (6 people) session was to examine chipping up, or growing your stack in the earlier stage of MTT's

(Herschel calrified that this focus is on larger field tournaments. 180ish and up)


FORMAT:

We were hooked up on Skype and had set up free accounts at pokerxfactor.com.

After giving an overview of topics for the session...

a. Set out to chip up right away. Never miss an opportunity
b. #1 rule of mtt’s is “You must be willing to die in order to live."
c. Position! Position! Position!
d. Play a wide range in position and a pretty narrow range OOP
e. suited connectors
f. pocket pairs and implied odds

As we went along Herschel used a variety of hands on both PokerXfactor and one from Pocketfives to illustrate different principles. The focus was strategic and the value of what we studied in each hand was clearly irrelevant of the results.

Beyond the list of topics, however, Herschel let other concepts develop based on the questions we asked. Two that stood out in my mind were...

-the dangers of pot sized bets when have a big hand (driving away players that would call a 1/2 or 2/3 pot bet with a weeker hand).

-examining the rate at which you "cash" on tournaments as an indicator of playing to loose or too tight.*

*This second point sparked a good conversation with Oceanwaves later on, about the difference between playing to cash and playing to win.

Herschel always asked if we had any questions before moving to a noew hand or a new topic, but as a class we varied between passive sponges and active questioners. Something I see a lot of in my life is people who give a response but fail to answer the actual question they were asked (often b/c they did not understand or they want to move on). Herschel did a very good job of patiently answering every question he was asked. I really got a sense that he was working with us at these times.

Much of what we looked at eventually began to sort itself into some basic overall themes...

1. making value plays at the right time
2. working in position
3. taking calculated risks

Herschel provided links in the chat bar to make it easy for us to get to the hands he wanted us to see.

He also gave us simple typed summaries of the key concepts that we studied in differnt sections so that we could cut and paste them to a word processor. This was great b/c I tried to make written notes as well, and given the format of the lessons, that was very hard to do.
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All in all, I liked it. I definitely want to do more of these classes as they gave me a number of points that I think I can effectively working into my game. (BR will determine when this will happen, so thanks for the opportunity TP).

If there is one thing that I would change though, it is the timing. Herschel sets out blocks of time for these sessions and was starting up another lesson as ours was ending. Although I can understand the need for this, and the fact that we paid for a specific period of time, I would have liked to see more of a buffer at the end to allow for question and answer at the end. That being said, we did go over time, so it is not like he kicked our butts out the door when the egg timer went off.

One sign of a good lesson is that it generated as many new questions as it answered. I would have liked to have asked about the variation of different principles as applied to other tournament factors like short stacked play, or even ring games.

Granted, I am sure that there are entire lessons available on those points.

I am a 25 max full ring and $1-$5 tournament player and I found this valuable. I would recommend it.

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footnote: I played two $4.40 / 180 person SNG's after, in an attempt to focus on these principles in the early stages. I busted out of one early and finished 15th in the other. Results aside, I found quite a few situations that directly related to what we had studied.