Answers to my poker question... part three

Continued with my response to the first email:

The hand is very standard... it's why I picked it, though I did specify it was live and not Texas Hold'em poker online. In the intro, I cop to the fact it's a hypothetical, so I don't feel like my friend was insulting me because it’s not real. Not that he was the only one that didn't catch that is was entirely fake. In Monkey's response he referred to the flop by saying something like "if that was really what flopped.” Im pretty sure he was joking.

Yes, the hand is very close to one I played, but I made things simpler, with stack-sizes and positions changing. Only the answer-er on the button and the two blinds to deal with and some limitations to their stack sizes. Rather then just survey my usual network of friends, this time I decided to poll a wide group of people about it, and tried to glean some insight in where they differed. While this won't be helpful in my next Sit'n go per se, hard not to see the value in understanding the reasoning behind the actions of superior players.

As far as why I chose the hand... I didn't want to use a complicated hand or deep stacked hand, which is basically the beginning of a choose-your-own-adventure book, because some of those guys are so creative they could go anywhere with it. Still, even on standard hand we covered a lot of territory and a lot of different directions. I came to the conclusion the hand that it was similar to, kind of played itself out, so I thought that would make it a good place to start surveying everybody.

And as I stated, I was more curious about what took place in the thought process of players looking at the hand, then maybe the action itself, and I have to say I was borderline amazed at the variation of responses.

Jonathan Little, Kai Landry, Darryll Fish, another guy who is a beast online and live (but prefers to remain anonymous) Gabe Costner, Monkey, Reid G, PokerLusky, his boy Eddie, and a number of others have all responded. They all said the same thing that it was fairly standard, but they come at it from different angles and some advocate completely different strategies (situationally)--so not as standard as any of us might think. Certainly, there seems to be one more common way to play it, with slight variations, that comes through but the variations are the interesting points.

Really was hoping Tyler Smith was going to respond to the question but so far he hasn't. Just to see if his take is any different as his approach on the surface seems vastly different than many others. Didn't poll Jason Mercier either, but I'd be interested in his viewpoint. I knew Monkey's thought process would probably be different than say Fish and Jonathan Little, but just about everybody had different components they stressed that was important to the decision making process, even if advocating the same action. I realize that just because they didn't say something was important to the process doesn't mean they didn't use it as a variable either, but still what they chose to say vs. what someone else chose to say is illuminating.

I look forward to writing about it when I can stockpile the time as I got pages of information to parse. Truly the most informing (and most educational) thing I've done with GCP and I hope in delivering the information I can show the different mindsets of many of these really good players. I got a lot of value out of the exercise and hope I can pass it on. Like several of them wrote, they assumed I would be highlighting nuance at best but it's actually more than that.

Funnily, more than one who responded has followed up and asked who had the best response. It’s not like I would be the right person to judge any of these guys response as better than the other. There is no best one in my opinion, and truly every single answer was helpful.