Chris Halverson’s Blog

I didn’t play at all on Thursday night for a variety of reasons not the least of which was that I wanted to sleep well so I will be well rested for the trip to the casino tonight. We won’t even get there until 10PM or later, so a late night is in the works. Then I have to get up early on Saturday to go to a wrestling tournament. I played some on Wednesday though and was up a bit, but more importantly I found (yet another) hole in my game.

Basically, I sometimes fall victim to Fancy Play Syndrome (FPS). This usually happens when I’m winning, I get thinking that I can win if I play “smart”. The problem? This really isn’t smart at all. This is 50/1, there’s no such thing as buying a pot or bluffing. I don’t do stone cold bluffs, but I sometimes end up playing small or middle pairs too strongly and not getting out of the way. This doesn’t work too well at the lower limits at all.

Using Poker Tracker to look back at my top/bottom ten hands for the night, I notice the following:

• I won big when I played strong hands hard
• I lost when I fell victim to FPS

Not one of my top ten hands (ie. ones I won) were due to FPS play. The sad thing is that I know this and yet at times I fall victim to it. Even sadder is that virtually every time I do something like this, I hear a voice in the back of my head screaming “DON’T DO THIS!!!!”. Like I mentioned, I usually don’t do this when I’m losing, but more often when I’m winning. All of this was made painfully obvious when I went through and replayed the hands in Poker Tracker. Oy.

The big thing to remember is that at low limits, you cannot buy a pot or try to get people out by betting. You should bet for value or because you have a hand. If you don’t have a hand, get out of the way or take the free card. Iggy has told me this. Henry has told me this. Have I learned? Evidently not enough. Maybe somewhat because I hear that voice (or is that something else?), but not enough to stop me from hitting that button. I think that by seeing it a few times with Poker Tracker helped though. I mentioned this to Pauly yesterday who responded (copied directly from the email):

with low limits is all mechanical… stay disciplined and all should be good!

(yes, that great grammar comes from somebody who wants to be a writer… )

The point stands though. Just play the hand correctly, not doing anything fancy, and you will be fine. Yes, this should be obvious, but maybe writing it down will prompt me to remember it more.

Here is an interesting article about FPS (he throws in Occam’s Razor too) at Poker1.com.

My son only has a half day of school today. He just called me and said he’s heading over to a friend’s house to play poker. He called me two hours later and asked if I could drop off more money for him on my way home. Huh? They need food. Riiiight.
Off to the B&M tonight. Hopefully things will go well. It’s Friday night, it’ll be fishy, so anything’s possible.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 2nd, 2004 at 3:28 pm 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.