Rudy Edwards

Just before I went to visit my folks in Fayeteville, NC I discovered that an old Magic pro I got along with real well was in the Army and freshly stationed at Ft. Bragg. When I got into town, Chris Honan got in touch with me and we had dinner. We hung out a decent amount while in town. I showed him around my hometown and some great places to eat, while he told me stories about Ranger School and other things he's done since we last spoke. Chris is really intelligent. He's the kind of guy that John Kerry won't ever understand why he enlisted. We chatted a lot about poker, as Chris hasn't played much in the past few years, and I described to him the learning process I was going through figuring out no limit.

Chris sat next to me while I played some low stakes NL, and we discussed hands. I was doing my best to describe my reasons for every action until he understood what my whole approach was, and it reaped multiple benefits. First, the act of vocalizing your rationale for every important decision can shed an awful lot of light on where you are inconsistent or illogical. Second, Chris is an intelligent gamer himself and pretty soon we were having great dialogue about the games themselves.

I still hold to this day that the most important tool to improving your game in almost anything is intelligent dialogue. My biggest advances in Limit play were when I was working with Jim (The man who would eventually buy my store and free me for full time poker) and we were moving up stakes together, poring over our databases analyzing hands and breaking our play down multiple times a week. It was true on the pro Magic circuit as well, my game increased the more I worked with other pros and talked about the games, and it's true now in Poker.

My plan was to head down to Jacksonville and spend some time with Joe Crosby, gaming genius and good teacher. Joe was a teammate of mine in MTG, and has one of those brains that is just built for games. If he's not the most successful of our group in poker, he's close... and he's put a lot of time into the game. There is an endless amount of knowledge I can gain from watching him, discussing, and playing while he watches me. Honan also knew Crosby, and he had a few weeks of leave built up, and he took the trip with me to Jacksonville, then back to Atlanta to hang out with the old Magic pros for a few days.

Crosby gloated just a little, as he had been telling me (and all the limit players in our group) that we were banging our heads against the wall and should be exploring NL. Well, he was right and deserved the opportunity to gloat. We got a decent amount of incredibly productive poker time in, including a few hours of Crosby watching me play, where I really feel like I leveled up. I really need to get some more time in with Crosby if I'm going to accelerate through the middle-lower limits of NL.