White Belt Poker

It hasn’t escaped my notice that back in early January, I wrote about my target of starting to play in the HORSE tournaments at Full Tilt on March 1st this year, with the stipulation that I had to have played ten hours of each of the individual games involved before taking part. Well, it’s March 1st tomorrow, and will I be taking part? Have I put the hours in? Sadly, the answer to both questions is a resounding ‘no’. This horse is kind of somewhere on the back straight, finding the going a little bit heavy underfoot. Here’s the hourly break-down so far:

So it’s a bit of a mixed bag really. Although I’ve got stuck in to Stud and Omaha 8, I’ve barely started with Razz or Stud 8. I could offer lame excuses, but I won’t. I just haven’t been playing enough. It certainly isn’t because I haven’t enjoyed playing these games – it’s been very refreshing and enlightening, because I’ve been forced to concentrate as hard as possible and keep my brain in receptive mode, so that I can learn as much as I can in those ten hours of play; all the time trying to apply solid poker theory regardless of the game. One thing I’ve learned for sure is that if you play Omaha 8 with its myriad decisions and possibilities for any length of time then go straight back to hold’em, it’s like playing poker with the volume turned down. I found myself staring at my two pathetic hole cards thinking “I’m supposed to make a hand with this!”. But you soon get over it and go back to folding 8 out of 10 hands again.

If I’m honest, my lack of playing time has much more to do with the increased amount of energy my day job has been taking out of me since the start of the year, and that’s out of my control until I have a chance to take some time off, probably in early April. I just haven’t had the will to sit down and play often enough. March 1st was a pretty arbitrary date anyway – I only chose it because it’s St David’s Day – so, I’m going to give myself another week or two to complete the ten hours for each game. I have plans for a few evenings from Thursday onwards this week too, so it would’ve been tough to play anyway.

Then again, I’ll probably decide to just dive in there and play one night. Looking at some of the completed HORSE SNGs, they only take just over an hour anyway and with six minute blind increases you may only have time to reach the second ‘E’.