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I just want to give a quick shout-out to pocketfives.com and the twoplustwo forums. Both of these sites have helped my game tremendously although I am mostly just a lurker on both. I may begin posting more on both soon as my game improves more. I would go far enough to say that no matter who you are, you can learn something that will help your game on these sites.
I decided to go to Tunica saturday afternoon and play in the $100 buy in NL tournament. This particular tournament has a $10 dealer toke that gets you an extra 2k in chips, bringing the starting stack up to 6k. The tournament got under way with about 60 players. My table was probably standard, mostly soft except there were two guys who where 2/5 NL regulars.
I made it through the first hour and break, up to around 8k in chips. When we came back, the blinds were 200/400 with a 25 ante. I started leaking chips around this point, folding to a couple short stack all ins, etc. So toward the end of this level I’m sitting at around 5k in chips in the big blind. There are two folds, and the next to act is one of those two 2/5 NL regulars, these guys had been stealing very often. He makes it 1200 to go, and it folds back around to me. I look down at AKo and insta push, hoping to get the guy to fold.
He thinks about it for about a minute, says call, and says “I hope you have high cards”, and flips pocket 6’s. The flop comes K 10 J Rainbow. The turn is a 6, and the river a blank. So I get up, say nice game to everyone, and leave. I could have folded there, waited on a different spot, but I felt like I had good FE against that guy b/c of how often he had been stealing, and I really don’t feel bad about taking a coin flip in that spot.
I love poker. I hate poker.
Poker can be compared to life in many ways, because we must make decisions based on incomplete and often innacurate information. Life is not like chess where you can see every angle, every position on the board, and the player with the most skill wins. I have been reading StevesBets blog because I want to get more insight into what it is really like to be a professional poker player. For many of us part time poker players, this is our ultimate goal.
I wonder if that really is the best route for most of the people who claim the title. Playing poker for fun on the weekends and a few hours a day online for extra income is fun. Grinding out a living playing 8-10 hours a day may not be so much fun. Imagine working for a month and losing money. Even people with commission only jobs don’t get paid negative money. But it is a common occurance for a poker player to have a negative month.
My biggest fear if I ever tried to play full time would be killing the pleasure that I currently get from taking down a monster pot or making a few thousand dollars on a saturday.
I know many players who try to go pro end up going bust instead, but I wonder how many more just can’t take the grind. I know that to be successful long term, you have to stop seeing winning and losing pots, and see only +EV and - EV moves. If you win a 10K pot with a hugely negative EV, you should be mad at yourself for making a bad play, not congratulating yourself for winning the money.
