Chris Halverson’s Blog

Learn to labor and to wait. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

One of the most important aspects of poker is patience. The labor part? Grinding away at 50/1 hoping not to get sucked out on the river for the 43rd time in a session.

I’m just looking back at the last couple of weeks and am noticing some things about my play. One of the first things is that while I talk about the ram and jam here, at times I don’t do it enough. This is directly related to general aggression. Basically I am not being aggressive enough when I have good cards. I have come to notice that if I have the upper hand (so to speak), I tend to let people off with free cards. As we all know, free cards == infinite odds. This is not a good thing. The worse thing is that the other day I did it a couple of times when I had the nut flush draw going on the turn. I checked around and four of us saw the river. Ug! Yes, I missed my flush, but a bet on the turn probably would have knocked out a couple of people (maybe all). It was one of those hands where I sat there and as soon as I clicked “Check” I knew it was the wrong thing to do, but I couldn’t bring myself to click “Bet $1″. One dollar. See below.

Another big hole for me right now is suited connectors. I’m not talking the typical :party: “play any s00ted cards”, I’m talking legit suited connectors. I don’t like them. I really get nervous when I get these (not including big slick suited, that’s easy). I have read Abdul’s pre-flop strategy and I still don’t like them (I need to read that and Izmet again, and again). To tell you the truth I’m not sure why. For some reason I think that they are not worth much, but in reality they are. I need to adjust my play to incorporate suited connectors again. Once again, I’m not sure why I think a flush draw is a better chance than a straight draw, but looking at my play that’s exactly what is happening. In some ways I’m taking Jones a bit too far when I look for a reason to fold.

Iggy reminded me that I need to quit thinking about the money. I hit a big downswing over the last couple of weeks which led me to change my point of view of my bankroll. Playing with scared money led me to change how I thought about my bankroll. I need to stop thinking about the money and play the hand correctly, no matter what. If the odds say I should play the hand, then play the hand. I need to look at it in terms of just being “chips”. It is not money, at least not in the “real” sense. I must get over the mental block of this being money and just play the hand correctly. Even playing straight ABC poker at the low limits still requires you to to get over some of the mental parts of the game, especially when you’re a new player. I don’t get too upset over the bad beats and I try to not to let the downturns affect me too much (after all, poker is just one big session, right?), and I think I’ve done fairly well in that respect. Sometimes the money thing still comes back to bother me. I know it should not bother me, at 90% of the time it doesn’t, but in certain situations it jumps in my face. It didn’t bother me when I was winning, but when I’m losing it started to bother me. Playing scared is not good mentally.

I’m hoping that by bringing these issues up, it will force me to confront them head on and get over my damn self and fix them. There are some semi-serious issues here. Thanks to some pointers I see that a lot of this is mental and that I can get past them if I don’t let it bother me in the first place.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 27th, 2004 at 12:05 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.