Looking In

I promised some poker content tonight so here it is along with the blogger tourney summary. Last week I had to write my self evaluation at work along with a bunch of other work. Hence, the lack of content on here recently. Anyway, writing my evaluation reminded me a lot of writing this attempt at blogging. It required me to look back at the last 12 months and figure out what I did and what I accomplished/acheived. While, this may sound fairly straightforward, I find this extraordinarily difficult. Granted it didn't help that I was playing in the blogger tournament while writing a piece of it or that I didn't have the equivalent WorkTracker to look back. The evaluation comes down to grading yourself in 4 categories along with supporting writing for why you deserve the grades you assigned yourself. In a parallel poker evaluation, what would those categories and subcategories be? I guess it would somthing like the autorate rules flying around for PokerTracker. Loose/Passiveness, Preflop aggression, post flop aggression, winning money at showdown... But that really doesn't take into account what kind of play comes natural to you. (Primate Poker had an article about this a while back.) You often hear a lot of talk about which category is best but I tend to agree with articles like that above where the best style is really the one you can do best with. As an example, there are a lot of people out there who get bored playing very tight. This type of play may eventually get to them such that they start playing their B game because they are just not having a good time. Even with discipline to remove this kind of tilt, I think that player would be most effective playing whatever suits him best. Though, that should not be a license to allow myself to go off and play poorly because it's fun. Suckouts are fun in the short term but
that doesn't make it my best style. For me, I tend to have a lot of fun (and win money) with a sLA-N strategy, using PokerTracker terminology. Something on the order of 20% VP$IP, 8-10% preflop raising, and middle of the road aggretion. Though, that just leaves us back with a very theoretical framework around which categories make you a good player. I think there are also a lot of softer non-stat things to consider as well.

So, in the end, what categories or criteria make a good player? Let me know what you think.