Wednesday 10 December 2008

Poker Mindset etc..

I decided to delete my last post - "The night of horrible big pairs" as there was absolutely no point to it. Its just variance and for the large part I made the right decisions for all the posted hands and just didn't get lucky that night. I guess I just felt the need to vent some frustration but posting isn't the way to go.. it certainly won't make any fun reading for anyone else other than reminding them how crappy poker can feel at times.

Another hand came up recently that I almost posted about, but resisted the urge as I made the right decisions again and just got unlucky. It was just that it was the largest cash pot I'd ever been in ($495) and so hurt all the more to lose 2 of my normal BI in one hand.

Exactly how I ended up at a $1/$2 6-handed table is probably more interesting... I was playing my usual FR $0.5/$1 and one of the players was perhaps the biggest fish I had ever seen. He was playing 95/3/? for 500+ hands and was a consistent loser. Unlike most other fish though he reloaded several times. You could almost feel everyone else at the table praying for a decent hand so that they could take this guy's cash.. it was just so easy. His revealed hands showed he was calling down huge raises all the way to the river with nothing.. not a pair or even a reasonable draw. I managed to get at least 1 BI myself from him before he left the table. I checked for his player ID and he was seated at a $1/$2 6-handed table so took a decision to sit down and try and get some more. He was playing in exactly the same way and I was soon up $140. He sucked out on one hand against me and reduced the gain to $60. In the final $495 pot before I left he was also well behind and beaten by both me and the other player. I guess the player that beat me had a decent draw and I could well have been trying to bully him out of the pot so I that could be alone against mr fishy. I'd raised well above the odds he would have needed to call with his draw so it was probably a -EV call by him but again the variance got me rather than my play. I'm sure it can be a bad decision to hunt fish on tables/levels you don't usually play at but in hindsight I think it was a reasonable decision in this instance even if it didn't pay off.

I've been a little on tilt since and definitely not making the correct decisions every hand. Fortunately it hasn't hurt financially too much and I'm only marginally down for the month (less than 1 BI), so time to refocus my head, forget what could have been and grind on!

The clean look of my PokerTracker stats from the beginning of the month has definitely changed:(



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