Galfond skrev detta om "skottning":
People have a wide variety of views on “shot-taking” in poker. Basically, shot-taking is playing a game that is bigger than the game you usually play, often with a much smaller bankroll than is considered significant for those higher stakes. Some pros believe you should never do it. Some do it all the time. I believe that shot-taking is actually an important part of progressing as a player, but it isn’t right for everyone. You have to be smart about it. Shot-taking also affects the dynamic of the game, changing the way people play and creating profitable situations if you know what you’re doing.
Professional poker player, writer, and coach, Tommy Angelo (tommyangelo.com) once wrote:
You might consider eliminating the phrase “taking a shot” from your speech, writing, and thoughts. You are not “taking a shot” when you play a limit higher than you’ve played before. What you are doing is playing a limit higher than you have played before. That’s it. Just like you have done in the past, just like millions have done multiple times. It’s not something to second guess before you even do it. It’s just something to do or not, like any selection, like folding, or changing seats.
I agree completely. Too many people have it in their minds that they’re just gambling. That isn’t what shot-taking should be about. It is just another decision you make. And just as you should have a good reason to fold or to change seats, you should have a good reason to play a bigger game. Let’s talk about some reasons to take a shot. (I didn’t eliminate it from my vocabulary because it’s the easiest way to describe it. Sorry, Tommy.)
One reason to take a shot is potentially to speed up your process in moving up in stakes. Another is to get practice playing against better players. A third is to keep you interested and excited about the game. People have all kinds of reasons, good and bad, to take shots. Hopefully you’re smart enough to distinguish the good from the bad.
However, as I said in the opening, shot-taking isn’t for everyone. For instance if you were gonna take a shot at 25/50NL, and losing $15k would affect you very negatively either emotionally or financially in your non-poker life, you shouldn’t take that shot. If you are going to be unable to move back down because it will feel like you are playing for pennies, you shouldn’t take a shot. If you aren’t a favorite in the higher game, you shouldn’t take a shot, unless you just want to practice against tough players and are prepared to pay to do so.
You shouldn’t take shots for fun or to gamble unless you are 100% honest with yourself about your motivation and what’s likely to happen.
Sometimes you have an extra advantage when taking a shot in a big game. This usually comes from knowing your opponents better than they know you. Let’s say you’re usually a 10/20NL player, and you take a shot in a 50/100NL game with one big fish and one well-known solid pro. Assuming the pro doesn’t know you, you can actually have an edge on him if you play your cards right. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Sorry.
What I mean is that you can make plays based on how you expect he’ll react to an unknown player. He probably won’t assume you will be making advanced bluffs, like a river bluff-raise. Or when a third spade hits the turn and you bet again, he will assume you’re more likely to have it than most regulars in the game. Another thing you should think about is the first impression you make. Since he has no prior knowledge of you, he will usually tend to put too much weight on the first few things he sees you do. So be very conscious of the hands you show down and how they might affect his thinking about how you play. A very successful tournament pro once told me that when he gets moved to a new table, he likes to raise his first hand there, almost no matter what it is. People think, “Wow, this guy just got here and he’s already raising pots. He must be really loose-aggressive.” And most of them take a long time to realize that they were wrong.
Sometimes, however, you can be at a disadvantage, both to the rich fish who doesn’t care about the money and to the seasoned pro. Most people don’t realize it, or are afraid to admit it, but they play differently when the money means more to them. Some people tighten up preflop. Some see more flops but don’t put their stack in without the virtual nuts. Most people start out tight, and then once they make one bluff, they can’t help themselves from making more. I think that in general people play more aggressively when they play very high stakes. Aggression is good, but often they overdo it and actually become underdogs in games where they are normally better players than their opponents.
Pro poker player and good friend of mine David Benefield thinks that it has to do with the shot-takers seeing so much money in the pot and wanting really badly to win it. A 10/20 player taking a shot at 50/100, who is used to seeing flops with $130 in the pot and giving up with a gutshot, suddenly sees $800 in the pot and decides it’s time to make a move and win that money. The effect increases even more in really big pots. Dave puts it nicely, explaining their thought process as, “zomg NERVOUS zomg look at CHIPS zomguhhhh BET!!!”
Dave’s actually onto something. In Malcom Gladwell’s Blink, he has a chapter discussing stress and adrenaline and their effects on the body. He cites author and former army lieutenant colonel Dave Grossman:
...the optimal state of “arousal” - the range in which stress improves performance - is when our heart rate is between 115 and 145 beats per minute... Most of us, under pressure, get too aroused, and past a certain point, our bodies begin shutting down so many sources of information that we start to become useless.
“After 145,” Grossman says, “bad things begin to happen. Complex motor skills start to break down...At 175, we begin to see an absolute breakdown of cognitive processing...the forebrain shuts down...Behavior becomes inappropriately aggressive.”
Alltid vart så att han insta-leftar å startar upp ett nytt bord när han dubblar?