Only a day or two before this post, I told my brother what good poker I was playing.  And I was, too.  I had gotten into a groove of beautiful play, in which I kept my opponents off balance by mixing up my passive and aggressive, loose and tight play in such a way that they couldn’t be sure when to press and when to lay back.  Online poker players tend to err towards pressing. My unpredictable play coaxed many a soul into pressing at the wrong moment and getting trapped into pushing all their chips into the middle an then, ultimately, into my stack.

About the same time I told Dave about my good play, I stopped doing that.  I got loose and instead of duplicating the unpredictable play I had been using, I just played.  Everything.  It is easy in poker to forget that there is a time and a place for everything and you start believing that is just your particular brand of awesomeness that is creating your success, not the exploitation of others weaknesses.

All poker success boils down to exploiting other people’s weakness.  Your strength is never all that strong.  Even with the best hand in No Limit Hold ‘Em (which is a pair of Aces), you are still only about a 7 to 1 favorite against any random hand.  So any fool that decides to push all his chips into the middle against you still has a 15% chance of coming out on top.  And there is no way you are going to get AA every hand.  So it only gets worse from there.  All that was to say, the strongest of hands isn’t all that strong and doesn’t win every time.  But a weak player can be beat time and time again if you just figure out what scares him and, just as important, what emboldens him.

So we have established that I have been donking it up for the past few days.  I had told Dave when I was still on my winning high, that by the end of January I wanted to be back to being a profitable player on my Sharkscope rating.  That didn’t look like it was going to happen after the donkfest, I was still roughly -$200 over the course of 950+ tourneys.

I joined a $2 buy-in 180 player Sit N Go on Full Tilt.  Over the course of the next 2.5 hours I did something absolutely wonderful.  I regained my unpredictable play.  I used table position ruthlessly and confused the crap out of a bunch of players.  I made a few mistakes, but only a few and usually against players who couldn’t really hurt me.  I was even the tourney short stack once at the final table, but came back out swinging and quickly regained my position.  Heads up, I got outdrawn one time and ended up being a 10 to 1 (or worse, I can’t exactly recall) underdog, came back out swinging again and beat the snot out of my opponent.  It was beautiful.  Did I get lucky?  Hell, yeah.  You have to if you are going to win a tournament.  Remembering that I was never that weak, nor my opponents that strong, did way for me than winning a few coin flips, though.

So now 179 souls are $2.25 poorer and I’m about $95 dollars richer.  I’m also now halfway to making that profitableness a reality and I’m psyched.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 21st, 2008 at 12:36 am and is filed under poker, sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.