White Belt Poker

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.