Comments on: Cherokee Report – Part 6 – Q+A

By: Dale White

Dale White — Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:12:53 +0000

Thank you for your six part series! Staying at Harrah’s Cherokee in August. Looking forward to it as I seem to visit every August. Will heed your advice. Thank you, Dale White

By: Al

Al — Sun, 30 May 2021 03:48:22 +0000

DON’T BE AFRAID TO USE STRATEGY CARDS IN THE CASINO! Unless tribal casinos are different from Las Vegas casinos, the management won’t mind your using them. I always use my strategy cards when I play VP in Vegas. They actually spare me from having to practice on my computer before a trip. I start a playing session, and whenever I honestly don’t know what the correct hold is for a certain hand, I just look at the card, and I “relearn” the correct strategy. This will happen several times on my first day of play, then I only need the card occasionally on the 2nd day, and then I rarely need it on the 3rd day. And no matter how “on top of it” you feel, you can still get hit with a momentary brain malfunction and not know what to hold; having your card there allows you to look up what to do and prevent an error.

By: Kevin Lewis

Kevin Lewis — Fri, 28 May 2021 16:57:27 +0000

Like you, I’ve played a LOT of NSUD in these past few years, for the same reasons. I didn’t play much at all over the last 14 months, like everyone else. So when I hit the South Point earlier this month, I found that I was making a few of the same errors, over and over. In particular, I was missing holds like A35 suited (and throwing away all five cards instead), and for some dumb reason, I kept holding other double-gap three-card straight flushes even over a plain old inside straight. The former error has a trivial cost but the latter can be quite expensive. I fixed these errors after self-monitoring and slowing down for a couple of hours until I was sure I was playing optimally.

I was surprised that a game I had been able to play extremely rapidly and reflexively without any errors was now one where I had to stop and think. My hands per hour rate dropped like a rock (and this really bothered me, because I was “putting in time” to earn gift cards and this forced slowdown meant I had to spend that many more hours to achieve the same goal). What I seemed to have lost was my ability to instantaneously evaluate a hand. What I had regarded as a skill that had become ingrained turned out to be one it was all too easy to lose without practice.

Did you notice any discernible pattern in your errors when you were practicing?