White Belt Poker

Took my first real beating tonight. Played for almost two hours at pokerroom.com at my usual $0.50-$1 limit. I was down $12 when I left. Table atmosphere was kind of unpleasant. Some guy called miroslav80 was telling people to fuck off when they beat him. He went from $32 down to zero, then put in another $10 and ended up at over $90 when I left. He had an unbelievable run of cards and seemed to be winning almost every hand – to the point where people were leaving. It almost looked suspicious.

As for my own play, I’m going to have to analyse it. The cards I had were poor, but I tightened up because of the maniacs to my left. I didn’t get a big pair all night, and even when I made an ace-high flush, it got beaten by a straight flush. I was pretty sanguine about it though. I didn’t tilt, which I was pleased about.

I’ve just looked through the stats of the session in Poker Stats and there’s not a great deal I could’ve done differently. Overall, I need to look at how I’m playing medium pairs (particularly in early position) as well as KJo, which seems to have got me into a lot of trouble.

After succeeding in my quest to gain a party poker baseball cap and $25 bonus, I now need to get my PokerRoom.com bonus by 13th Jan. This is going to be trickier than the party poker bonus because I need to gain player points which depend on the rake.

I’m going to have to play about 250 hands where the rake goes over $0.50, which at my current $0.50-$1 limit is not easy. You’ll pretty much need a showdown for a pot to go over $10 to give you a 5% rake of $0.50.

Just realised yesterday that my Party Poker $25 bonus is about to expire on Wednesday. Luckily I only have to play 125 raked hands to get it. Co-incidently, this will also get me a free Party Poker baseball cap as well. I’d only played 15 hands so far, but a couple of hours later I had 75. Also made a few bucks.

I love playing with drunks at the weekend. One guy went from $17 to $40 in the space of 30 mins (not with more than $1 of my money), and was chasing every hand, completely on tilt. He even told us all that he was drunk but was still kicking our asses! He left the table after he went down to $13 about half an hour after that.

I’d gone in with the intention of playing ultra-tight just to get some hands in to reach the bonus mark (okay and I wanted the free cap), but opportunities present themselves and I ended up playing normally, coming away with around $10 for an hour’s work (I mean ‘play’).

I’m not finding it that easy to work out the quality of the players that I’m up against, but one thing I’ve noticed which separates people is the ability to check-raise.

I think it shows that that person has made the effort to learn about the game to some degree and at the low limit tables I’m on, I’ll instantly give someone respect. I won’t run away from the table, but I’ll be careful not to mess with them and I’ll put it in the notes section for that person.

And what a powerful weapon the check-raise can be.

That pause that you get when someone unexpectedly walks into a check-raise is exhilirating. They don’t know what to do. They feel as if they’ve been tricked, but they’re not quite sure how. What are they supposed to do now? Most will eventually fold if they haven’t been in that situation before. Then they’re frightened of you. The pauses get longer if they’re thinking about betting after you because they don’t know what you’re going to do.

This is my first real glimpse of how a little bit of poker knowledge can really elevate you beyond the people who are just playing for fun.