Description: After work on Thursday, I stopped at the cardroom on the Avenue and played some 4/8 limit – and got very lucky. Seat 1 came open and I took it when my name was called. Within the first 8 hands, I had taken 3 of them for monster pots – after 1 round of the button, I had turned my $100 buy-in into nearly $340. I don’t remember many of the hands, but I do know that by the end of 2 hours, I had 4 full racks plus a stack or 2 of 20-tall sitting off to the side.
I played fairly tight and folded most of my hands, but my chip-stack and tight image allowed me to make a couple of bluff-raises when scare-cards would come out so I could scoop some minor pots that I probably wouldn’t have won at showdown.
As for play at Chumash, only 1 hand really stands out in my mind. I was in seat 2 (my favorite) at the $60 NL table and seat 1 was tilting – he had been raising nearly every hand for the past 10 minutes. I look down at pocket 10’s and raise to $10 from UTG, everyone else folds and he calls from the BB. The flop was a very nice 752 rainbow which he checked. I bet $7, and he raised $20 more – I’m doubtful that he’s got an overpair or an A, so I put him on K7 or Q7 – and move him in for $45 more. He insta-calls and flips over J7 of spades. Turn was a devastating Jh giving him 2 pair and the lead – but he had been a nice guy and we’d chatted as we’d been playing so I said, “There’s your jack – nice hand.” and was getting ready to match his chip stacks, especially when the guy in seat 3 tells me that he folded a 10… When the case 10 pops up on the river and I re-suckout on him! Woohoo – what skills I gots ;-)
Poker is a fickle game – you get in with the best of it, watch it sweep by you as your opponent catches a longshot, and then you end up back on top when a miracle river hits… I mentioned before that I get sucked-out on all the time – but I’ve begun to be more accepting of it. But I rarely re-suckout on people – so it’s extra special when it does happen; it’s like a little smile from the poker gods. Or something like that.
The reason I’ve recently begun to be more at peace with getting sucked-out on is because of a passage that stood out while I was re-reading Sklansky’s Theory of Poker, where he quotes Bobby Baldwin – whom I will very loosely paraphrase here and try not to mangle too badly:
A good player will more often than not be the victim of a suckout because, the majority of the time the good player will get their money in with the better hand – not the worse hand – and, because of this, will see more suckouts go against him/her than for him/her. Because of this, the good player had better get used to being sucked-out on since poker is a game of odds and chance, as well as skill. Besides, your emotional sanity will directly correspond to how well you believe in this axiom.
Of course if I said that it was great that I got sucked-out on, you’d know that I was full of crap – as their name suggests, suckouts do indeed suck and we all hate when they happen to us. But, I am getting better about handling them more objectively, about not taking them personally, and about not letting myself get as tilted when they do happen.
Bottom Line: These past 3 days have resulted in a $505 increase to the poker drawer (plus another $15 from coming in 2nd at our monthly poker home-game). I netted $332 from Thursday’s venture to the local cardroom, and $173 from the $60 NL table at Chumash.
Lessons: I simply got lucky at the limit table – no lesson to be learned there. I played solid poker at the NL table – as I was already up to ~$140 from my original $60 buy-in before the miracle river 10, so even if I had lost that hand I could’ve ended the day “up”. But that re-suckout was definitely the high point of these 3 days.
To some extent, playing very-tight and fairly-aggressive has become my playing standard. There are so many aggressive players (because they read that aggression is key, or they see a poker-pro playing fast and loose on TV and think this is how poker should be, or whatever) that I have found myself playing a softer version of poker than I would prefer to. I do this because I believe in playing opposite of your opponents – and because, since I know how to bide my time and pick apart these aggressive players, I assume others would too; hence, that this style wouldn’t work for me in the long-run. Perhaps I’m giving them too much credit, maybe they wouldn’t pick up on it…
This is not to say that I can’t change gears and play aggressive when I need to, it’s just that I rarely need to. Perhaps this is a mistake, and maybe I should take 20 minutes out of each 2 or 3 hour period and play the maniac, or pick a few pre-determined junk hands and play them like aces whenever they show up, or some other game-theory-type changes to my game…
I don’t know, I feel like I’m in a bit of a rut and that I could be doing better, doing something… different.
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