Friday, June 17, 2011

Chapter #3

Things were running well in my challenge (see 1st post--basically trying to run .59 cents up to a healthy 1-2 bankroll or more) until today when I lost 30 BBs in an hour. Sometimes the ball goes where it wants to. I still have 7 golden tickets to sell if I need to. Back to the beginning...
Honeymoon bliss doesn’t always include poker results. I was reading Small Stakes Holdem and had it next to me at all times in the middle of a session. I felt as though I was gaining a better understanding of how to play LHE, but the results were still not there. Looking back this could be attributed to a wide array of reasons, which were mostly under my control. To name a few,
1) I was not taking any type of notes on my opponents which meant that I was not trying to assign any type of hand range to opponents in a general/specific manner.
2) I was not practicing any type of Bankroll management and would get upset when I lost, what I considered to be a lot of money relative to the stakes (2-4, 3-6).
3) I should have started at a lower limit in order to get my feet wet and not put myself in the situation of tilting when I lost a big pot. Losing 5-6 BBs at .25-.50 or even .50-1 isn’t as upsetting as losing that at 3-6.
4) I was playing too fit or fold type of poker at the beginning of a session and then go on tilt about half way through.
Another reason for the common occurrence of tilting on my part was due to the fact that I had unrealistic expectations. I would play 2 tables at a time for up to 45 minutes and get pissed if I hadn’t won any $$. This leads to #5…
5) I wasn’t keeping track of the specifics of each session (I think I mentioned this in my last blog), other than I knew I that I had won some money or lost it. I didn’t know what my winrate was, how many hands I had played in the session, how many hands I had played to date, what my stats were, seat selection, blah blah blah.
I was getting to the point that I didn’t think that poker was something I would ever understand or do well at. I wasn’t all that happy with my new job and it looked as if the company that I had been with for nearly 11 years was starting its freefall towards redundancy. Although I enjoyed my honeymoon 3 months earlier in Hawaii, I still felt as if my wife and I could use a vacation somewhere that I had never been before that would be fun. Have you said it yet?
It was my first trip out to Las Vegas and I was a bit stunned at the non-stop action of the place. There were 5 couples that went out there together which was nice for me because I could get a chance to try out some live poker which I hadn’t really done before. I went to the nearest 3/6 table and bought in for 30 BBs. I told myself that this was to be the barometer of how much I understood about the game and based my decision of whether or not I should continue online, on my results from that trip. The first session was identical to how my play on Paradise poker was going, a slow constant leak. It started to pick up a little and the trip ended with me being up $67, which was around 11-12 BBs for the stakes I was playing for the first time. As I look back on that trip, I remember how smart I thought I was and how much I acted like a dick towards other people.
“How could you call that? What did you think I had? How can you check raise that?” you know that ol’ chestnut. This poor etiquette is something that I have had to continuously work on.
After my Vegas trip, the Thanksgiving/Winter holiday season began and there wasn’t much time for online poker. I decided to give LHE one more try in late December of 2005 based on the fact that I was feeling more comfortable with basic strategy. I deposited $225 on Paradise Poker one last time and played only $2-$4 FR LHE with a max of 2 tables at a time. I must have been on Santa’s nice list that year because I ran hotter than Georgia asphalt in June. For anyone familiar with proper Bank roll management , $225 at $2-$4 is 56 BBs and it is recommended to have around 300 BB in your roll, so I was unintentionally conducting a 50 big blind experiment. I ran my $225 up to a little over $2,000 in 2 months. The only way I could describe how I felt at the time would be…

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