Enlightenment
I beg to differ from Ben's statement of earlier tonight. Poker is awesome.
It's just that, until tonight, I was approaching the game all wrong. All I needed was to move up in stakes and play against tougher competition.
This may not make sense at first to anyone with any knowledge of poker. I started my latest Doylesroom stint just yesterday, and my bankroll was the measly $187 that I had left over from a decent run on Party over the previous two weeks. Playing 1/2 was dumb enough as it is; moving up any higher would be suicide. The most common rule of thumb for limit poker bankrolls is to carry 300 big bets into any limit. I was playing 1/2 with 93.5, not even a third of the standard bankroll.
But I was feeling extremely bored tonight and couldn't find a 1/2 table, but with two 2/4 tables open and waiting for me, I couldn't help myself. Not even a sixth of the way to the amount of money I should have had, but it didn't matter. If I won, it would be a huge confidence booster. And if I lost, it wasn't the end of the world. I follow the Golden Rule of Gambling -- "never gamble with money you can't afford to lose" -- so the worst-case scenario for me was taking time off from poker and going back to having a life.
But as it turns out, moving up made me into a better poker player. I'm not kidding. I had put in so many hands at 1/2 that I was beginning to make the slip from confidence into complacency. I needed to be risking more money. It isn't a matter of unhealthy gambling addiction (quitting poker is easy; I've done it a thousand times), it's simply the fact that raising the stakes helps to keep me focused. It's not as though I can't beat a 2/4 game; I've read enough poker literature, both online and in books, and put in enough practice that I can handle any low-limit game.
At 1/2, I would make too many stupid bluffs, knowing I would get called, and I would quickly come to terms with the fact that I was throwing money away. It was worth the extra two bucks to see if I could make the stupid 1/2 fish (as I viewed them in my more arrogant days) throw the best hand away. At the same time, I would also play worse when the opponents were the aggressors. I would make loose calls, knowing they were loose -- either I was too lazy to calculate my pot odds or I knew them and just didn't care -- because it was fun.
So today came an amazing realization: I was a better player at 2/4, despite the tougher competition, than I had ever been. Fear of losing serious money motivated me to play with the skill that I had actually had all along, buried deep inside this cluttered mind of mine.
As for the results, they could have been better. I took a couple of terrible beats, including one where I fired hard on every street with QQ, holding an overpair, and was called all the way down by A4 offsuit, which won by making a single solitary pair of aces on the river. I ended up overcoming my early troubles and finishing a one-hour session with a $46 profit. I quit, got some studying done, had some dinner, went to class, came back, and later tonight logged on again. I made another $1o, but then realized I was too tired to play my best, and quit again. I was getting more disciplined not only as a player, but as a manager of my play.
In short, everything's falling into place, and I'm feeling more confident than ever.
3/6 anyone?
Just kidding.
It's just that, until tonight, I was approaching the game all wrong. All I needed was to move up in stakes and play against tougher competition.
This may not make sense at first to anyone with any knowledge of poker. I started my latest Doylesroom stint just yesterday, and my bankroll was the measly $187 that I had left over from a decent run on Party over the previous two weeks. Playing 1/2 was dumb enough as it is; moving up any higher would be suicide. The most common rule of thumb for limit poker bankrolls is to carry 300 big bets into any limit. I was playing 1/2 with 93.5, not even a third of the standard bankroll.
But I was feeling extremely bored tonight and couldn't find a 1/2 table, but with two 2/4 tables open and waiting for me, I couldn't help myself. Not even a sixth of the way to the amount of money I should have had, but it didn't matter. If I won, it would be a huge confidence booster. And if I lost, it wasn't the end of the world. I follow the Golden Rule of Gambling -- "never gamble with money you can't afford to lose" -- so the worst-case scenario for me was taking time off from poker and going back to having a life.
But as it turns out, moving up made me into a better poker player. I'm not kidding. I had put in so many hands at 1/2 that I was beginning to make the slip from confidence into complacency. I needed to be risking more money. It isn't a matter of unhealthy gambling addiction (quitting poker is easy; I've done it a thousand times), it's simply the fact that raising the stakes helps to keep me focused. It's not as though I can't beat a 2/4 game; I've read enough poker literature, both online and in books, and put in enough practice that I can handle any low-limit game.
At 1/2, I would make too many stupid bluffs, knowing I would get called, and I would quickly come to terms with the fact that I was throwing money away. It was worth the extra two bucks to see if I could make the stupid 1/2 fish (as I viewed them in my more arrogant days) throw the best hand away. At the same time, I would also play worse when the opponents were the aggressors. I would make loose calls, knowing they were loose -- either I was too lazy to calculate my pot odds or I knew them and just didn't care -- because it was fun.
So today came an amazing realization: I was a better player at 2/4, despite the tougher competition, than I had ever been. Fear of losing serious money motivated me to play with the skill that I had actually had all along, buried deep inside this cluttered mind of mine.
As for the results, they could have been better. I took a couple of terrible beats, including one where I fired hard on every street with QQ, holding an overpair, and was called all the way down by A4 offsuit, which won by making a single solitary pair of aces on the river. I ended up overcoming my early troubles and finishing a one-hour session with a $46 profit. I quit, got some studying done, had some dinner, went to class, came back, and later tonight logged on again. I made another $1o, but then realized I was too tired to play my best, and quit again. I was getting more disciplined not only as a player, but as a manager of my play.
In short, everything's falling into place, and I'm feeling more confident than ever.
3/6 anyone?
Just kidding.
posted by eclinchy at 11:12 PM
1 Comments:
BLOG SPAMMERS. DIE. ROT IN HELL.
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