Jim Reid is a longtime lover of poker, a member of the PokerOrg Player Advisory Board, and host of the popular RecPoker podcast.
Hey gang! I’m getting excited for the WPT World Championship event at the Wynn next month. I've booked my flight down (December 10!) and in typically degen fashion it's a one-way ticket. We’ll just see how it goes, and I’ll fly back whenever it makes sense.
So far my plan is to play the WPT Prime Day 1d on December 11, maybe play the ClubWPT Gold $5M freeroll a couple of days later (which reminds me, anyone got a spare ticket for that?) and then fire my bullet at the Championship that weekend.
This will be a tougher field than the WSOP Main Event, so I will late-register to minimize the deep-stack edge my opponents will have against me in the earlier levels. Even with all the coaching I’ve been getting from Matt Affleck along the way, it’s going to be a tough field. Boy, am I excited though!
A lesson in c-betting
One of the great lessons I’ve learned from Matt so far is about c-betting the flop from early position, when playing a single-raised pot heads-up against a caller from the big blind. While the general rule will also apply when opening from later positions, what matters is that most of the pots you play will be heads-up and against a player from the blinds.
When considering a c-bet, it's all about board texture. Here’s one simple rule you can use: is the highest card on the flop a ten or higher? Or is it a nine or lower? It sounds crazily simple, but this one heuristic can save you a lot of mental energy at the table and set you up for success later in the hand.
Flops with lower-ranked connected cards like 
are more favorable to the calling ranges of the players in the blinds: if we c-bet them too frequently, we risk getting check-raised off our hand (or called by the player in the blinds with a strong range), putting us into trickier spots on later streets. We should bet less often, and use larger sizings when we do.
Flops with broadway cards are much more favorable to our opening ranges, and we can c-bet them more frequently - and when we do, we can use smaller bet sizes to apply pressure to our foes. It's not only because we hit those high cards more often to make a pair; it also means that broadway turns and rivers are more likely to help our range as well. With more high cards out there, our most likely holdings continue to improve.
You can work with Matt yourself, and I strongly recommend it! If you’d like to start by following along with our progress, the Wednesday coaching sessions are recorded so that premium members at RecPoker and PokerCoaching.com can join us in real time each week, or review the videos at their leisure.
Calling out the jerks: it’s up to us
The last thing on my mind today is a question that one of our YouTube viewers brought up in our live interview with Seth Moeller on the RecPoker Podcast on Monday. Mike Day asked how we can make the live playing experience less intimidating for new players - and women in particular - who far too often face ridicule or bullying at the tables. Of course this is a problem that transcends poker; you can see it in every aspect of our lives, particularly these days.
But when it comes to our own community, we all need to do a better job of curating the company we keep. As I mentioned in our interview with Veronica Brill a few weeks ago, there are plenty of kind, well intentioned ‘whales’ out there (I’m one!) so why are we catering to these jerks? It’s up to us to make the poker rooms and floor staff understand that we won’t tolerate rude or abusive behavior in our spaces. Ultimately, they are the only ones who can enforce their rules, but they won’t ostracize these a**holes if we don’t start to do it ourselves.
So next time you see someone being a jerk at the tables, please consider doing more than nothing. It’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, and it’s past time to let all of our lights shine.
Check back next week for more from the hardest working ‘Rec’ in poker, Jim Reid.
Additional image courtesy of Rachel Kay Winter
