Posted by Dr Fro 1:12 PM
Last night was the $200 tournament. I was at the perfect table: all very passive (just the opposite of John’s table). This meant I could be extremely patient in waiting for the right spots to gamble. Surely if I sat there for a couple hours, at some point, I would get some good cards, right? Wrong. In two hours, I won a total of 2 hands. That sucks. I got terrible cards. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t mind getting bad cards; I would just say that the pendulum swings both ways. However, this particular night, the pickings were so good, it is a shame that I never got a chance to take advantage of it.

Only one other player at my table had ever played in a tournament before. So, I was playing with a bunch of guys that didn’t know what they were doing. (I don’t mean that as a knock, they all admitted that this was their first tournament.) While their tournament strategy was lacking, they all had the general gambling/poker skills they needed. Thad was a perfect example. Although initial confused by the blind structure and other aspects of NL Hold’em, he quickly picked it up: this is evidence of a guy that has spent plenty of time around a table. After an hour, he was on or above par with the average guy at our table (whatever that means).

I wish I could tell you a great story about how well or how poorly I played any given hand, but since my cards missed all but 2 flops, I can’t. I can however remind you that all the skill in the world (or lack thereof) means squat if you don’t get good cards, especially in a tournament. Of course, the corollary to that is that if you get great cards, it really doesn’t mater what decisions you make – you will win, which brings me to the side game:

In just under 2 hours, I won $330 in a side game with some pretty low-stakes poker. That can only be done by winning 90% of the hands, which is exactly what I did. When you make natural boats and Ace-high flushes in 5-draw, it is pretty hard to not make money. But, just because anybody can make money in that situation, it is not the case that all people would make the same amount of money. A bad player may have walked out up $100 and a pro up $600. I don’t know exactly, but I do know that in cash games (unlike tournaments) it’s those little decisions that make the difference between winning $100 and $300. And if you lose $200 on half the nights, the difference between eking out $100 or $300 the other half of the nights is the difference between being a winner and a loser in the long term.

I am just going to focus on one particular hand to illustrate this. It’s five card draw. Preflop, I bet and am raised a guy to my left. I call and we each take 1 card. Any fool would know that we both represent 2 pair, and this guy was not playing like an unpredictable idiot, so I put him on the 2-pair. I draw my full house and know that he has a 4 in 47 chance of getting his. I also know that he is not sophisticated enough to know that he shouldn’t bet the 2-pair if he misses the boat. Therefore, I check, and sure enough, he bet. I raise and get one more bet in. I say, “show me your two pair”. He does, and I show the boat and take the money. Point here is that most other players would have bet from my position and only got one bet on the river, but the check-raise got two bets. That got me $20 extra dollars and was the difference between winning $310 and $330 on the night. Take 15 other similar decisions on the night, and you see my point about the little decisions making the difference.

One more point of note is that I intentionally (once I had a lot of chips) targeted Curtis and Jay to get involved into heads up big pot hands. I (correctly, I think) figured them for the two best among the competition. By putting them in these situations, it added volatility to their stack. Even if they “had the best of it” the swings would, at some point bust them. That is what happened, and I was then able to play against the other guys, which were not as strong (one was drunk and the other guy told me he had only played a couple times).

Anyway, I was lucky as hell to get the cards that I got, but I feel like I made the most of it, and hey, at least I won back my entry fee!

0 Comment(s):

Post a Comment