White Belt Poker

I’ve been interested in zen philosophy for a few years now and I could see how some of the ideas could be applied to playing poker. Then I came across this book by Larry W. Phillips.

My copy arrived from Amazon a couple of days ago and since then I’ve been spending my lunch breaks sitting somewhere quiet and reading it. The author is quite realistic about how zen principles and poker are incompatible in many ways, then gives a hundred rules to play by. There is a lot of good advice in this book. There’s nothing about which starting hands you should play or discussion about odds and probabilities – it’s more about controlling your play and your emotions. Lots of emphasis is placed in concentration and being “in the moment” and aware of what is happening at every stage. One of my favourite sections states how you should go to the table expecting nothing. Others talk about the need to take your ego out of the game and not take things personally.

Finally made the $20 bonus after many hours of play, with two days before the deadline. That was a bit of a slog. Think I’m going to play elsewhere for a few days or maybe I’ll take a day or two off. Then I can get back to just playing without thinking about whether the pot goes over $10 or $20.

Talking of bonuses – where the hell is my Party Poker cap?? Well, at least they gave me the bonus money I suppose.

I may also have found a little niche in the market at PokerRoom. There seems to be a mostly scandinavian crowd there at around 6-8pm GMT with very few Americans. I made a very quick $8 in 30 mins before a pretty spectacular system crash locked everyone out for about an hour. I’ll have to keep an eye out to see if there are soft games like this every night at that time. A quick hour’s play while my brain is still switched on after work wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Probably the worst hour of my poker career so far just wiped out the previous two days worth of profits from playing at Pacific.

I lost $21 in an hour on a $0.50-$1 table.

It was ugly. Every premium hand I had got cracked. People were making back door straights and flushes on me, no matter how much I made them pay. If I had pocket kings, someone else had pocket aces. I wasn’t even as if I was tilting.

And I can’t even look at what I did wrong because I can’t get the hand history because the Pacific software is so bloody awful. It just always tells you to log out then back in again and when you do, the history still isn’t available!! Grr!!!

I’m going to watch some late-night TV with a cup of tea to unwind a bit.

I was getting little tired of playing at PokerRoom, so I just thought I’d spend some time at Pacific just for a change of scenery (okay, and because the players there are not the greatest). In general it’s a pretty soulless experience playing at Pacific – the software isn’t very attractive, there are no hand histories, you can’t add player notes or classifications, the chat window is horrible and keeps flashing, and the players you get there have a habit of trying to avoid blinds by sitting out (which obviously doesn’t work), so you have to be careful to keep an eye on your “auto post blinds” box.

After an hour and a half of getting dealt utter trash I was down $8 and feeling a bit down even though there wasn’t much else I could’ve done given the cards I was getting. Then suddenly I caught some good cards and within 10 mins I’d made $25.

I may need to play a little looser here I think, or at least try to stay in hands longer unless there’s a lot of betting. Starting hand requirements won’t change, but I’m going to try to look for chances to stay in pots longer when I have marginal hands. For instance, tonight I had two pair after the flop (8s and 9s) but feared overcards. I just checked and called a guy down – I think he had JJ or something and was gambling on hitting another one. I caught another 9 on the river but I may have won the hand without it anyway, but it’s so difficult to tell what people have at low limits. Raising and re-raising seems to have little effect at this level, people will stay in with practically anything. Staying in a hand for very little when you think you have more outs may not be a bad play on occassions. I think I’ll go back to read Lee Jones’ book on low limit hold’em again for advice.

I’m having to keep a separate spreadsheet for working out Pacific wins and loses because there are no stats or hand histories to speak that could be imported into Poker Tracker. So far my hourly profit is $4.50 over nine hours.

I finally got around to buying Poker Tracker to record my stats. The guy who wrote it (Pat Isaac) sent me the registration code within a few hours, despite it being New Year’s Eve, which was cool.

I’m still learning what the program can do, but it’s already allowed me to find a few holes in my game which I’ve mentioned previously – playing KJ too aggressively and playing medium pairs for too long.

I’m so glad I found this program before I started writing something myself.