So a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away I thought I would start a blog. For myriad reasons I was far from prolific, and the entries died. That said, a few of them set some historical context for where I am on my poker journey, so I will reenter a few of them here. The first outlines how I fared in the year after some accidental success in a WPT satellite lead to me me playing more poker. I was very much in a learn and trial by discovery phase at this point.
From June 24, 2008...
I'll start with some background and an update on my pursuit of poker as a source of income, and perhaps a downstream career possibility.
The last few months I haven't been running so great. It has featured a lot of losing from ahead in some pretty big spots, or running good and not closing the deal. I hate when players write or talk about their bad beats like they are the only ones who lose from ahead, (or like they never get their money in bad and suck out) so I will make it a practice to spare all of the gory details of hands where I feel like the poker Gods have forsaken me.
I was at the WSOP to play the 1,500 limit hold 'em and the 1500 shootout events, as well as to take the opportunity to play some bigger cash games than I have in the past (I was specifically looking forward to playing the $30-$60 Bellagio game - it has been a goal of mine since I stepped into the Bellagio room for the first time two summers ago playing the $4-$8 to see how I could hang at that level with $1500 in play).
So to link this back to bad beats with gory details, some of the most interesting moments for me at the WSOP were of the people watching / amateur armchair psychologist variety. At the onset of any break during any event, I quickly learned that the hallways would immediately flood with a sea of twenty something event participants in their standard poker "costumes" (ball cap, grubby tee, chris moneymaker shades, 12 hour shadow, the occasional phil laak hoodie), all engaged in fervent conversation on their cell phone with some loved one or a homeboy about how some jackass caught up to them when they never should have been calling, blah, blah, blah...
A sea of analyst participants, broadcasting their sob stories to whoever was sweating them from a distance. Quite an interesting phenomenon to absorb for sure.
So anyway, my updates back home during these cel-telephonic updates weren't great. A three hundredth place finish in the 1500 limit, with about 880 runners, midway through level 6, and not even close to a sniff of the money (something like 90 paying), and really I was pretty freakin' overmatched by the format (and probably my experience level in limit mtt events). By the time we got to level 5, the average stack had about 9 big bets, which really didn't leave a lot of room to miss if you weren't chipped up from the early going. I played it like a nit, and was going fold, fold, fold until I realized that I would have to pick a hand and go with it, because the format was running me over. Probably not the best strategy if you want to win the event, and it made me pause to reflect on what I was going for. I think I was playing not to lose instead of to take the thing down, so a part of my take away from the series is to always play to win (never play not to lose).
There is some play that I've observed from top young, aggressive players, as well as seasoned pros, that seems to support the merit of taking this approach. Really, if paydays are weighted heavily for finishing number 1, I've got to figure out how to accumulate chips quickly, and a part of this will be being ok with the semi-occasional early exit. This may run counter to the way that I'm wired (patient - trapping - great joy derived from outplaying, not winning flips), so I'll have to make some adjustments and play around to see how I can reconcile this notion into my own particular poker idiom.
I tried out an early version of this concept at our local poker league this last month and took down first place while playing from behind in more than a few key hands. But the fold equity in my aggression made it so even though I was 42% in a couple of key spots (OK, and 22% in another), I always had my opponents well covered. My buddy Ted may never talk to me again, as I busted him by playing from behind in two consecutive hands.
I don't want to be in the habit of playing without the house edge, but I think the long term EV with an aggressive posture, especially when you are deep enough to have some fold equity when you are three betting, and relying on some basic weak / strong tells at the table, while creating more volatility in results for sure, has to yield more wins (even if there are fewer moneys). I'm going to play with this for the rest of '08 and I'll touch base and let you know how its going from time to time, although between work, building a house, and having a light bankroll after my WSOP debacle, I don't have a lot of plans to play a lot of stuff in the rest of '08.
If the Fallsview WPT satellites get rolling again, I'll try to do some of that, but I think that the WPT may be going busto - something is fishy and I read that they are losing their television contract with GSN, and I know their stock has been getting hammered, so we'll need to see why Fallsview stopped the sats. I want to play some low dollar MTTs online (maybe some Fulltilt daily doubles, as well as some of the pokerstars $5+.50 limit tourneys, like 2-7 lowball and what not), but I'll probably wait until we get out of summer and the weather gets crappier. Online is a better crappy weather sport, especially when you live in Buffalo with five kids, and summer is like six weeks long.
I'll also be playing in the monthly local league, as well as hosting a monthly home game. I'm going to try to avoid the Seneca rooms like a plague - they only spread 2-4 (occasional 3-6) limit, and I definitely don't play with an edge in any of the NL cash games there, and it feels like playing the showdown lottery - not a lot of room for subtlety to be honest.
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