It was, without question, the worst night of my short poker life. I’d left the table with nothing before, but that hadn’t happened for more than 2 months, and the last time it did, I was playing smaller stakes.
Of course, compared to the other, more glamorous writings, even $3-6 limit is small stakes. But I had spent regular time and effort over the past few months playing, learning (or so I thought), and building up a stake of a few hundred dollars, one winning night at a time.
In the course of one night, a serious dent was put in that stake. I left a bit shaken, wondering what I was doing for nearly 6 hours, wondering if I really had the chops to be playing. Losing can do that, especially when you lose like that trying to be a poker player, not a gambler.
The irony of this particular situation was not lost on me. I have a co-worker who had been dying to go play, who had been begging me to take him with me. I declined the ride sharing arrangements because I wanted to come and go on my schedule, but he had begun going anyway. After his third session of $1-2 limit play, he came in to work on Monday swearing off the brick-and-mortar games. All he could talk about was how he kept on getting beaten when he held good hands, high pocket pairs and such.
I tried to explain to him, with my still-limited knowledge of the game, that in low-stakes games, with many people in many pots, that good starting hands would often get drawn out on, and that his experience was expected, not an anomaly. All week long, though, he wouldn’t buy it, and was convinced that there was something wrong with their play, that he “should” be winning because he was betting good hands.
That’s one of the killer words, in both the English language and in poker. And it’s one of the things that led, I think, to my awful week.
Whenever that word “should” creeps into your thoughts, it’s usually associated with some sort of expectation. Often, that expectation is of others around us, that others “should” behave the way we’d expect them to, maybe even the way that we’d behave. More often then not, you’re just fooling yourself. And that affects your game.
My “should” this night was that I “should’ be able to beat this game. After all, I’d beaten games like it before. I’d played a fairly tight game before and walked away with a profit. Heck, I’d even lost my initial buy in, bought more chips, and walked away with a profit. So I “should” be able to do it again, right?
Not this night.
Bad players might blame the cards for a bad run. Good players know that cards even out in the long run, and one night is nowhere near the “long run.” This night I played for nearly 6 hours, which is, what, 150-200 hands. I played few of them. I don’t usually like connectors that are not suited unless they are face cards. I don’t usually like suited cards unless they are both connected (or nearly so) and both high (unless one is an ace; then I’ll tend to relax the requirement of the second card).
I was getting few hands that even I liked for starting. When I came in with hands that needed help, it wasn’t coming. When I did improve, other players who had stayed in the pot usually improved more, and too often I failed to read that correctly. Overall, though, the cards were running such that I don’t think I made it to more than about a dozen showdowns, and I won only 5 of them. In 6 hours.
I recall only one hand from this night, the last hand, which, naturally, I lost. I was in the big blind with 14 $1 chips and looking at one of my better hands of the night, an A-Q offsuit. There were only a couple of limpers, so I raised. Everyone folded except the small blind, who raised back.
This was a fairly new player at the table; the person who had been sitting on my right most of the night had been a fairly loose player. My first—and only—thought was that he was trying to steal the blond and raise, so I capped the betting. The flop came all rags and I went all-in with my last two chips.
Looking back, I know what you “should” raise with pre-flop. With all the pre-flop raising that had been going on all night with rags, the last thing I expected was someone playing at least partly by the book. (I say “partly” because he didn’t raise when the action came to him initially.” What hand is a virtual automatic raising hand pre-flop?
That’s right, pocket aces.
The small odds that Q-Q would come on the turn and river didn’t pan out, as expected, and I walked away from that game significantly poorer.
I also walked away significantly discouraged. I wondered if I actually belonged at that table, or any table.