I have a dream……
But I can’t remember it when I wake up.
I decided to not write any posts for a couple of days because it was starting to feel like they were getting shittier, so I figured a few days off would refill the tanks. The tanks are now full again, but it remains to be seen if the posts will be good. They must be decent so far, as no one so far has said, “Geez dude, your posts are shit”. That, or everyone is too nice and doesn’t want to discriminate against the guy with an oversize noggin. That’s right buddy, I’ll sue. After all, I’m an American, and am thus entitled to large sums of money for perceived injustices.
It appears that this week on The Today Show is “Baby Week”. Great, just what we all need, more breeding propaganda. Quick, churn out more peasants to fight in unjust wars for a puppet with the vocabulary of a sixth grader. Can you tell I’m having issues this morning? I spent the weekend reading various political things that caused me to be particularly incensed, but this is not a political blog (for the most part, at least), so I’ll cut it short.
Hella Hold’em put up a good post about the struggle some of us have with being aggressive. As a fellow INTJ personality type, aggressiveness is one of my bigger struggles. In the last couple of months I have made some good strides towards being more aggressive, but I realize I still have a long way to go. I don’t have a problem standing up to the aggression of someone else, but taking an aggressive lead is not something that comes naturally to me. It is finally starting to come together a bit more, in that I was able to put a few moves together on some folks this weekend to take down pots that I previously would have let go, simply because I “didn’t have the cards”. While showing down the mortal nuts to take down a huge pot feels great, it feels equally good, if not better, to win a medium pot with nothing.
A new and pretty darn fun activity came about by accident this weekend. My wife and I sat on the couch together, each with our own laptop, and played $5 +.50 SnG’s together. We obviously couldn’t play in the same one, but it seems to make my wife amenable to playing poker more often. I haven’t narrowed down what exactly it is yet, but we both have moneyed, if not won, every single time we have done this. Try this on one of those many nights when there is nothing on TV. It’s great fun for a low, low price, and your spouse isn’t annoyed because your not doing anything together or paying him/her any attention. I gave my wife $50 from my PStars roll (which put me down to about $550), now she is on the way to building her own roll and mine is back over $600. Nice dude, nice.
I think I’m going to have to buckle down and buy PokerTracker, in order to accurately gauge whether I completely suck or not. OK, I know I don’t completely suck, but Party sure makes me feel like I do at times. I guess I’m still just having a problem adjusting to the much bigger swings there. You may remember previously that I tilted away nearly half of my free money roll on Party early last week. This weekend I tried to buckle down and make something of the $45 I had left. Over about 8 hours total, things went like this: Post blind, fold to multiple raises. Catch premium hand shortly thereafter, get sucked out on. Be patient, climb back up. Make a decent gain, get knocked back to even on an unlikely suckout. Table breaks, go find a new one and start over. I just couldn’t seem to hold on to any of the gains I made, and after all of that playing, end up at $47.75, yippee. 15-20 BB swings on a roll that short, in a word, sucks. The good news is, I didn’t tilt at all (not even subtly), and kept playing my good hands aggressively. If I had played in the super weak-tight style that is my natural tendency, I would still be down a bit because I would not have extracted all of the bets that I did. So chalk another one up to controlled aggression, lesson reinforced another small bit. Still, posts that state, “I deposited $50 into Party and now one month later I have over $1000” make me think I either totally suck or am doing something very wrong. Oh well, I’m confident that it will work itself out over time as long as I keep plugging away.
One thing that I think is worth mentioning is that I am much better at controlling tilt these days. In days past I would have tilted away my small portion of Party Poker money because of the sense of injustice that rears it’s ugly head when my KK gets sucked out on by a 10-6o on the river. I’ve actually internalized the fact that in poker there is no “justice”, and my premium hands are not entitled to win every time I hold them. They should win a large majority of the time, but there will be times (sometimes in a row) that they lose. Oh well, I’ll keep taking those bets everytime.
Geez, I’m starting to sound like a support group member…..maybe I should write a Serenity Prayer for poker players….
Poker Gods, grant me to serenity to accept the suckouts I cannot change….
Courage to be aggressive on the scary boards…
And the wisdom to know when I should get away from a hand that is obviously beat..
Post this on your PC monitor, my children, and be at peace.
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