Pokerlogy

It’s been a while since I wrote on my blog… I actually was thinking about giving it up because I haven’t been playing so much lately.

The reason is because I’ve been tilting a few weeks ago and didn’t feel good about playing. That’s an important lesson that separates the disciplined players from the undisciplined players. Poker is after all a game a skill but without proper discipline all the skill in the world won’t help you.

When playing poker games, you are accepting that at some point during the game, you will have to take chances or mostly known as take a gamble because you can only hope to win even if you have the best hand. What I mean is if you have the nuts before the last card you could win 99% of the time but there is that 1% of the time where your opponent could draw for a better hand if that draw exists.

At some point you’re going to have to decide whether or not you want to commit all your chips or not with a 99% chance of winning. This example is a bit drastic but the same principle applies to situation where you have a 70%, 80% or even 90% chance of winning. Would you put in all your chips knowing you’ll win 9 out of 10 times? The answer would be yes but after careful evaluation of possible hands your opponent could have.

Now if you can’t accept losing 1 out of 10 times then this is where the game is going to get you. When you’re tilting or whenever someone is tilting, no matter how good you are, players will tend to loosen up their plays. Why? In order to become tilty you must have lost a pretty big hand to someone’s lower cards so you might get the feeling that if you play crappy hands you could outdraw your opponents. That is completely false and over the long term will cost you a lot.

So what to do when you can’t seem to win at any game or level? Simple, take a deep breath, scream if you want to (make sure you’re alone), let go of the table, DO SOMETHING ELSE! The screaming part is doing something else, although not too healthy so I wouldn’t recommend it. Bad beats are always going to happen but not as often as you might think. If you feel the cards are running against you then why not stop before losing even more money? There’s always tomorrow, there’s always another time. If you can’t discipline yourself with this you’re going to lose a lot of money and before you know it you’ll be on thin ice with your bankroll.

What I like to do? Open up heads-up play money tables and simply push all my chips on every single hand. This way I could lose but that’s fine since play money is only for fun, it doesn’t include real money. Although I like to do that, I will usually start with whatever chores I need to do for the day and then if I still feel tilty and have time I’ll start play money tables. Usually I don’t have the time after my chores or I’m simply too tired =P.