Zoom Poker and Life Update

blackrain79 living in thailand
Haven't updated this blog in quite some time so here goes. Life wise I am living in Thailand still. It does not suck. The only thing that can actually be tilting about this place at times is the internet. But I tend to move around a lot and when you do that you pay the price with crappy wifi much of the time. If I actually stayed in one place for awhile (but where is the fun in that?) the broadband situation here actually isn't that bad. It isn't as good as Canada but it's like maybe 75% as good in Bangkok and 60% as good in other major cities. Still easily grindable.

I have been able to meet many poker players here now. There are tons of grinders from a lot of different western countries, the US, Britain, Germany, Canada and France being some of the most common. There are in fact huge communities and "poker houses" in all the major hotspots in Thailand (Bangkok, Phuket, Chiang Mai especially). It is really cool to be able to speak the same language so to speak and by that I mean poker. I have always maintained that trying to discuss this game with someone who isn't a professional or serious side income grinder is kind of pointless. They won't understand. At all. Or they will just tell you a bunch of bad beat stories and go off about how rigged it is.

Pokerwise I have been switching over to Zoom lately on Pokerstars. I thought it was just a gimmick for a long time and never really played much of the old Rush poker on FTP either. But it actually is a lot more fun in my opinion. It is very fast paced, something that I am already used to from years of 24 tabling, but there really never seems to be any stop to the action as the fast fold button eliminates any time spent on hands that I will never play.

I actually do think there are more fish playing Zoom than regular poker. I think Zoom/Rush is the new big fad and so it naturally is going to attract more of them. I think they love the speed of it also and the ability to get to their big hands faster so that they can play them badly. This also appeals to the bad regs and nits. They can now fold even faster which means that I can steal their blinds and cbet/barrel the hell out of them with even greater efficiency!

But probably the best thing of all that I like about Zoom is no more damn table selecting! My game the past few years has been built heavily on playing musical chairs. When playing regular tables I literally am spending more time these days looking at the lobby than at the actual tables. My philosophy towards the game is based on the maximum exploitation of the fish and it just isn't 2005 anymore where you can be guaranteed to have one or five of them on your table at all times. Zoom eliminates this. I constantly tag fish as I play and I can easily look at the player pool in the Stars lobby and determine if I want to play or not. I haven't found it to be an issue at all. The Zoom games are always stock full of fish and bad regs.

I should mention that my newest series on DragTheBar will be all about Zoom both full ring and 6max. People have been asking me to do this for a long time so it's finally going to happen. Same format as the Crushing the Micros series' of the past. I will do a couple videos at several microstakes limits starting out at NL2. The first ones should be coming out later this month.

Lastly I should mention that I will soon be embarking on a huge project of which I will say absolutely nothing about right now :)

If you want to know my step by step strategy for crushing small and mid stakes poker games, grab a copy of my free poker cheat sheet.

zoom poker and poker travel

8 comments:

  1. Nice to have news about you man!

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  2. hi nathan

    hows it going mate. I am back to grinding NL$5 lol after a stint trying CAP games. I was straight into "crushing the microstakes" to refresh myself and its cool that your tactics still work.

    If you need anything reviewing or put into practice for a few 100k hands let me know.

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  3. Good to hear from you guys as well. GL with the grind Rossi.

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  4. After reading your book on the regular tables i have successful at NL2. Zoom Poker NL2 crushes and destroys my money as a nuclear explosion. No more Zoom! But the convenience and speed of the game that sometimes I will play again and lose money again. Mostly I encounter a better hand. I thought as I play big pots only with sets or better hands that will be better, but still the same, continue to lose money. No more Zoom!

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  5. Hi Jacek,

    I am glad that you are having success on the regular tables. But sad to hear about the nuclear explosions on the ZOOM tables haha. Remember, it could just be variance though. But so much of poker just boils down to confidence. So if you are winning at the regular tables I would suggest to just keep playing them and forget about the ZOOM.

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  6. Jacek,
    This also occurred to me at first! You have to realise that player types are different in zoom talbes, you will find way more nits at those games!

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  7. hey ! are you buddhist ? i like its phylosophy and meditation tecnhiques...

    i would be very glad to hear from you :)

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  8. Hey Vitor,

    I am not Buddhist but I have always liked it and studied it a fair bit as well. I hear it's pretty popular in this part of the world :p

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