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The crisp, red/orange leaves and the barren trees that I see outside my window have subtly convinced me that November is finally here, and that another year is coming to an end.  Maybe that’s why I’m in such a damn self-reflective mood right now, but a lot of my time lately have been spent on me dwelling and reflecting on what happened last month.  I feel like October 2009 was a particularly hard month on me.  I didn’t mention this before, but poker was actually only secondary to some personal problems I was going through that involved some of the closest people in my life. A lot of relationships were broken, some restored again, but nonetheless not the same.  And then having to suffer a significant monetary loss from poker, it was a rough month both mentally and emotionally.  I was thinking a lot of my personal issues may have probably translated to the tables which has inevitably caused me to play non-optimal poker.  However, now I think I am fully recovered emotionally, both from my personal issues and the monetary loss involved in the month of October.

There’s one specific element of poker that caught my attention while I was reflecting about my game last month.  As a little preface, let me share what Will from cardplayer said once when I was first starting out w/ poker, a comment that has still left a tremendous impact in me: “Generally you want to induce mistakes from opponents by making your opponents fold incorrectly in tournaments, and making them call incorrectly in cash games.” Now looking back, I think there is a logical argument to this statement.   I could see people folding too much in tournaments since “their tournament life is on the line,” and people calling too much in cash games because all they have to do is reload again and get a “second chance.”  Of course, that is not to say that one should ALWAYS play recklessly in tournaments, and to only get it in w/ the nuts in a cash game.  However, it points out the general mistakes that people tend to make given the nature of these games.  And in light of that, I found myself leveling myself to the point where I was spewing off chips by making a lot of hero calls during this month of my epic downswing,.  For some reason this hand that I played maybe 3 weeks ago has been replaying over and over again in my mind.

$2/4NL. 100BB deep against a mediocre reg.  I raise w/ 56dd from the CO and villain from the BB calls. flop comes 3s5s7d.  Villain checks, I cbet to $20 and villain who has about a 20% c/r’ing range c/r’s to $60.  I call.  Turn Tc.   He fires $108.  I call.  River Ks.  He shoves for his remainder stack and I call.  Villain shows KJo and wins the pot.

My reasoning behind this hand was probably somewhere along the lines of this.  Villain raises a wide range of hands in this situation, i have a blocker to any of the sets that he has, and i also have a gutter along w/ my hand so I call.  Turn is essentially a blank so I call again.  River, the FD missed, and it’s a good scare card so I call.  And then I lost.

I think the way I analyzed this hand isn’t too terrible.  But in some ways, it is a terribly played hand in many aspects.  Esp. w/o any history, and w/ no reads on how he will react in future streets holding air OOP being the c/r aggressor, I think this was a bad call-down on my part.  If I didn’t have any reads, the default should be to fold, not to call.  I feel like I forgot all about the basics during October.  Hold’em could simply be broken down to this: do you hold em or fold em? Hold’em could simply be about getting your money in better than your opponent does.  Hold’em is all about aggression; passive poker is never good in the first place.  Unless tarping is optimal against a really aggressive reg, the default should be me being the aggressor, not the aggressee(?), if that makes sense.

Which leads to my next topic: I realize now that planning for future streets is so important in this game, and that my present decision should be affected by what I plan to do in the future.  It blew my mind when I heard this from one of Phil Galfond’s videos from BFP.  He said, “Just b/c you think you may be holding the best hand now, doesn’t mean that you should necessarily call on that street, b/c you won’t be able to handle future streets.”  He illustrated this example when he was playing this guy HU, and he was in the BB calling the button’s raise.  Sorry I forget the exact details of the hand, but flop went check/check.  The turn card brought a FD/SD to the board and I remember Phil had a marginal hand that he wanted to get value out of / bet for protection.  His opponent ended up raising his turn bet, and Phil explained how even if he thinks that his hand is probably ahead of the range of hands that this guy is raising his turn bet w/, he cannot profitably call b/c he doesn’t know how to deal w/ the river on various cards against this specific opponent.  So he ended up folding, even when he though his hand was slightly ahead of his opponent’s hand range.  And I feel like the way to excel in poker is to avoid getting into these tricky spots as much as you can, and exploiting these tricky spots against other opponents to make their life miserable.  W/ the 56dd hand I played, I def. don’t think I planned my future street (the river) when I called his turn bet, so the turn is most likely a fold than a call given how marginal my hand was, even though I am probably ahead of his range.  And sure, this might seem exploitable if I keep folding to turn bets after a c/r, but it doesn’t make calling the correct play.  Also, there are so many other edges that I feel like I excel in this game anyways that I should stop bleeding money in this way by making huge mistakes like this.  It’s basically the same argument for not c-betting a J64ss flop w/ A8hh against an aggressive reg, and so on and so forth.

I think this is an important concept in poker that many people don’t understand b/c it seems counterintuitive.  “If I have the best hand right now, why shouldn’t I bet for value/protection?”  Probably cuz your hand might not be able to stand pressure/heat.  Also if you think about it, there is real way of knowing if you HAVE the BEST HAND right now unless you’re holding the nuts.  When someone says they probably have the best hand, they are trying to say “my current hand holding beats a lot of the range of hands he could have in this spot.” But of course, no one says it like that cuz it’s just long and retarded to say it like that.  They just say “I have the best hand.”  And that is where the confusion arises from.  One must realize that it is against a hand range, and not a specific hand that we are playing against when playing poker, which is the precise reason why betting our hand when we are ahead of his range does not guarantee that it is the best play (barring other obvious reasons for slowplaying, pot control, etc.).

I also think that what distingushes between a mediocre reg and a good reg depends on the amount they spew w/ marginal hands.  As someone once said, it is easy to play really strong and really bad hands.  It’s those marginal hands that are the most hard to play.

Anyways, I think I rambled for too long w/o making much sense.  As promised, here are some of the new pics of my newly refurbished room

(literally took 3 months since I’m a lazy bum)

So, I tried the grind setting above (inspired by Tom <3) last night, splitting 6 tables amongst 2 screens for a total of 12 tables.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t really used to this b/c I felt like I constantly had to roam around the screen, and I was just not able to focus.  But the biggest problem I had was not being able to table select fast enough, since opening and closing tables was such a hastle.  So instead, I have a new set up of cascading 15 tables on one screen, which is what I’m very accustomed to, and that I think is appropriate for SSNL.  I think the spreading 12 tables over 2 screens will be helpful when I move up to midstakes and such.

Btw, stars has this new feature where you can customize and save table layouts, which is very convenient for my purposes.  I could cascade 15 tables on screen, or switch over to 12 tables over 2 screens in less than 0.5 seconds (w/ my awesome desktop of course).  Stars rocks.

So in terms of this month, unfortunately work has been kicking me in the nutsack and I’ve been tired almost every day so not much volume as I wanted.  In addition, I’m still not done w/ my med school apps, and that needs to be a priority for now.  So I’m showing a lot of self-discipline by putting grinding on the back seat for now, unfortunately.  But I will return soon.  Trust me.  Thanks for reading

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