The past two Fridays were certainly a contrast. And although the results were similar, their scope was not.
Two weeks ago, I was still in the throes of recovering from a cold, an unexpected Christmas gift from my two-year-old nephew. I had been feeling up and down during the week, and workouts hadn’t really pushed the bug out of my body yet. Still, I was looking forward to Friday and poker.
Come Friday night, I entered Artichoke Joe’s with plenty of cold medicine and cough drops in-hand. Note that I don’t use cold medicines with antihistamines so I don’t get drowsy from them. Despite the medicines, I was still feeling a bit punky.
But I played anyway, a $6/$12 game. But because I was still feeling out-of-sorts, my concentration flagged a bit. At one point, after limping in with QJo and with what I thought was a nice board that contained a 10, a 9, and an 8, I was in at the turn, and especially the river, swinging away with re-raises. But I utterly failed to see that the board also had three of one suit, and when my final re-raise was called, I foolishly crowed “I have the nuts.” as I flipped over my cards, only to have the real hand winner reveal his two suited cards–including an ace–that made the real nuts.
To say that I was feeling embarrassed at that point would be an understatement.
It was a night, too, where I was just grinding away, up a bit, down a bit, but that hand, which resulted in a good 7 or 8 big blinds from my stack, was one from which I didn’t recover.
Instead of being just a bit more patient, I kept trying to poke at pots. I’d limp in with hands such as K-10 offsuit, and from most positions. Even though the game was mostly passive, in that raises preflop were rare, I was missing more flops than I was making, and so my stack leaked away, bit by bit.
But last night was a different story. I was feeling much better; a Thursday night session on the exercise bike followed by a steam room session had really cleared up my chest, and I pulled up a chair at a $3/$6 game ready to play.
And play I did. It was another one of those nights where I wasn’t getting cards. In fact, in about 7 hours of play (meaning somewhere in the vicinity of 150-180 hands), I never got AA, KK, JJ, 10-10, or AK. Talk about a cold deck.
But this time, I settled in, patience being my watchword for the night. My stack hovered all night right around my buy-in point. I was up a bit, then I was down a bit, never far from the initial starting point. And later in the session, when the deck went from cold to frozen, I finally had enough of being patient this night and cashed out. My loss? About $40.
I feel good about the night of play though. I played my game, a tight, patient game that gets aggressive only in the right circumstances. Yet in all those 7 hours, I won only 11 pots, far below my 2 pots/hour rate that seems to be the line between profit and loss. Had I played more loosely, like I had the week earlier, I probably would have lost a lot more.