Running Bad
First post, and it's a bitch.
Okay, I suppose as poker blogs go, this is extrememly lame, because I'm not even playing for real money. My idea is to hone my skills in freeroll games, get the point where I can do the math fast and accurately on a given hand, and once those basics seem natural, move into live cash games and maybe the nickel and dime online games.
But man, after gaining a certain level of confidence, the past two weeks have seen me doing some very bad running.
Good news: I topped 3 Million PokerStars Dollars (PSD) twice in the past month.
Bad news: Last night I dropped under 2.5 PSD.
Why?
Well. Recently I've gotten fairly proficient at putting people on hands. I play a table for a while, start out loose/passive pre-flop, lose some money with feeler bets, watch how things play out, and within a few blinds I've consistently been able to tell who has what by how much they bet, how fast they bet, and where they bet.
Nailing someone's hand perfectly is almost as sweet a rush as busting a deserving donk out of a game.
Cool, right?
Well, it's cool until you have a week where you yourself bust out consistently by losing your nut straights to flushes on the river, boats to frickin' quads on the river, flushes to boats on the river....
Seeing a pattern here?
What I've been doing is playing aggresively, forcing players all-in while they have inferior hands, and having them hit their 1,2,3,5, or 7 outers on the river on an alarmingly consistent basis.
In too many cases my best poker has lead to my worst results.
It's gotten to the point where I cringe if I'm sure I have someone dominated on the turn, because if there is a way for an opponent's hand to beat me, that way will hit on the river.
For me, the benefit to this episode is that a big hole in my game has been made obvious; running bad has a bad tendency to morph into playing bad. Running bad isn't a sin. Playing bad is. And I can see where I've done that on multiple occasions. I get frustrated and I go beyond aggressive into stupid. I stop trusting my reads. I start taking unneeded risks. I take it personnally when people notice that I'm running bad and start attacking my game. In other words, big-time tilt.
I fully expect the real world will be different than playdollar world. In playdollar world, pricing certain donkeys out of a hand can be nigh unto impossible. Especially the subspecies that haunts the tables immediately after normal business hours. Even at the high stakes tables, these people play like Gus Hansen (after the lobotomy) in the middle of a 36-hour crack binge. I don't expect those types of players to be as prevalent when real money is at stake because, well, it's real frickin' money.
But they will be out there in the real world (and at the real money online tables) nonetheless. They will call my obvious flushes with top pair on the flop and hit runner-runner to catch a boat. And statistically speaking, that will at some point happen consistently over some period long enough to count as a "running bad" episode. If I ever play for real money for any period of time, the "running bad" scenario is inevitable.
Hopefully what's happening now will prepare me for when it happens then. And even if I never play for real money, I've learned something about myself that otherwise wouldn't have been obvious (at least to me). And maybe by working through how to handle the situation at the poker table, I'll figure out how to recognize real-life analogous situations, and apply the same methodologies there.
Who says poker can't be good for you?
Okay, I suppose as poker blogs go, this is extrememly lame, because I'm not even playing for real money. My idea is to hone my skills in freeroll games, get the point where I can do the math fast and accurately on a given hand, and once those basics seem natural, move into live cash games and maybe the nickel and dime online games.
But man, after gaining a certain level of confidence, the past two weeks have seen me doing some very bad running.
Good news: I topped 3 Million PokerStars Dollars (PSD) twice in the past month.
Bad news: Last night I dropped under 2.5 PSD.
Why?
Well. Recently I've gotten fairly proficient at putting people on hands. I play a table for a while, start out loose/passive pre-flop, lose some money with feeler bets, watch how things play out, and within a few blinds I've consistently been able to tell who has what by how much they bet, how fast they bet, and where they bet.
Nailing someone's hand perfectly is almost as sweet a rush as busting a deserving donk out of a game.
Cool, right?
Well, it's cool until you have a week where you yourself bust out consistently by losing your nut straights to flushes on the river, boats to frickin' quads on the river, flushes to boats on the river....
Seeing a pattern here?
What I've been doing is playing aggresively, forcing players all-in while they have inferior hands, and having them hit their 1,2,3,5, or 7 outers on the river on an alarmingly consistent basis.
In too many cases my best poker has lead to my worst results.
It's gotten to the point where I cringe if I'm sure I have someone dominated on the turn, because if there is a way for an opponent's hand to beat me, that way will hit on the river.
For me, the benefit to this episode is that a big hole in my game has been made obvious; running bad has a bad tendency to morph into playing bad. Running bad isn't a sin. Playing bad is. And I can see where I've done that on multiple occasions. I get frustrated and I go beyond aggressive into stupid. I stop trusting my reads. I start taking unneeded risks. I take it personnally when people notice that I'm running bad and start attacking my game. In other words, big-time tilt.
I fully expect the real world will be different than playdollar world. In playdollar world, pricing certain donkeys out of a hand can be nigh unto impossible. Especially the subspecies that haunts the tables immediately after normal business hours. Even at the high stakes tables, these people play like Gus Hansen (after the lobotomy) in the middle of a 36-hour crack binge. I don't expect those types of players to be as prevalent when real money is at stake because, well, it's real frickin' money.
But they will be out there in the real world (and at the real money online tables) nonetheless. They will call my obvious flushes with top pair on the flop and hit runner-runner to catch a boat. And statistically speaking, that will at some point happen consistently over some period long enough to count as a "running bad" episode. If I ever play for real money for any period of time, the "running bad" scenario is inevitable.
Hopefully what's happening now will prepare me for when it happens then. And even if I never play for real money, I've learned something about myself that otherwise wouldn't have been obvious (at least to me). And maybe by working through how to handle the situation at the poker table, I'll figure out how to recognize real-life analogous situations, and apply the same methodologies there.
Who says poker can't be good for you?
posted by PhantomMut at 1:04 PM
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