White Belt Poker

I spent two hours playing at Party this evening and the longer I played, the more comfortable I felt with my decision making. Lots of players had come and gone during that time, but I felt as if I was working people out quickly and making good decisions. The key thing that I’ve been working on is deciding whether to bet or call on the turn. If I’m betting, calling or raising on the turn, then I’m calling the river as well (unless it’s a draw obviously). I got caught a few days ago calling a raise on the turn when I knew I was likely to be beaten. It was a bad decision and it cost me four small bets. It was a good lesson to learn, because that’s a quick way to leak money.

I don’t often play for that amount of time and this is the first occasion when I’ve felt stronger at the end of a session than I did at the beginning. I felt as if I was flexing a muscle that was growing in strength. That has to bode well for tournament play in the future.

I’m going to try to play longer sessions over the weekend to see if I can keep this momentum going.

I’m also still considering playing in the $10+1 limit tournament on Sunday at Poker Room. I followed a similar tournament while I was playing today. They seemed to be losing roughly a player a minute for the first hour and a half. I didn’t see how it finished, but most of the $10+1 tournaments have been lasting for 2.5 to 3 hours. You’d need to make the final table to make your money back.

I had a look at the Full Tilt software for the first time this evening.

It looks stunning. The animations on the players are very slick, especially when you fold a hand. The cards literally fold up and disappear.

I’ve got to say though that I wouldn’t want to play there for very long. There’s a lot going on, and although this doesn’t slow the action down, it was hard work visually. I could see myself getting a headache after an hour of that, even with a plain backdrop. Some of the other backdrops are cool, but very loud.

Still, if I could find a soft game then I’d probably try to live with it.

I’d been having a bad time recently. Well, I was at least breaking even more or less. But I wasn’t winning consistently the way I had been when I started playing a couple of months ago.

One of the books I’d been reading mentioned that cards can run cold for hundreds of hours. Given that I’ve logged less than 100 hours of playing for money, it’s too early to say whether I had got lucky early on but was now reverting to normal.

But it’s easy to blame the cards.

When I looked at my play through the stats in Poker Tracker I spotted some bad habits that I had got into. With any sport or game which requires repetative practice, there are flaws that can enter into your play that are so small as to be imperceptable over a period of time, but when they are analysed they become more obvious. I realised that there were certain starting hands that were costing me money. The biggest culprit was a suited ace. I had entered this fantasy world where I would play any suited ace from any position. I had convinced myself that Iif I only played them for their flush value then that was okay. The stats showed me otherwise. Although I would’ve sworn that I had won big money from making flushes from suited aces, there wasn’t any evidence of that. In fact, everything below AJs was costing me money – I was in the red. So I decided to go back to play AJs (and above only), unless I’m in late position and there are no raises in front. The other hand was KJ (again). I’d begun to play that pretty slackly, so I may just throw that away routinely unless it’s from late position.

I also noticed from the stats that I wasn’t being nearly aggressive enough – especially before the flop. That’s all tied up with loosening my starting hand requirements. So in the last few days I’ve tightened up and then been very aggressive. The results have been much better. I’ve only lost one hand that went to a showdown in the last four to five hours of play.