Archive for Category: Poker

Sometimes with just a quick look at a situation, all I can think is “this is fucked.”
And I mean those three words exactly. There’s no fancy thought process going on. No “What does my hand look like here? What’s his range and what’s he representing? Would he do that because of (x) (y) or (z) [...]

“Cuz all the good players say so..”
That’s not a bad reason. But there are better ones. The simplest answer is that poker is a game of incomplete information which means any information you can get is valuable. Your opponent acting first is information, therefore position is valuable.
If you ignore the effects of position and don’t [...]

Losing a buy-in to a no-hope donk’s 2-outer is not a good feeling.
The anger and outrage it causes in less experienced players is sort of justified, but the jump from “lucky idiot” to conspiracies of dodgy dealing? Not so much.
I guess it’s not really surprising that people would reach that conclusion in the naturally [...]

I really should’ve won this tourney but I stopped listening to my spidey sense.
Cash games are more my thing, but all these “Spring deal” tournaments attract hoards of donating zombies who end up making them worth the effort. Started 10/20 with a $3k stack.

This is me kick starting my tourney life with an early level [...]

Part two of my epic 12th place blow up.
Looking back, I think I just got tired, or distracted, or something. Either way, I suck. At the end of Part 1, we got all the way through to this hand:

The old -turn-raise-to-stop-the-gimp-from-min-bet-stealing move. Something I practice regularly. I’ve edited the publishing time of this one so [...]

There’s a difference, but at the same time I am talking about the same thing.
I’m into my Zen so I like these koan-style, bitesize chunks of perspective. What I’m talking about is a different way of looking at the same action — betting without the best hand.
Sometimes you make a bet and it feels like [...]

2 hours of 4xNL100 yesterday = +$287 — 3 hours of 4xNL100 today = -$41
Today was going well (+$200) until I got cheated for $100 by some idiot catching 2 running hearts all-in with JJ vs my QQ on the flop — after I made an elite shove into what could’ve been Kings or Aces. [...]