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I’m a great player (at the bar)

About ten years ago, I had an epiphany about playing poker. I was sitting at the bar after work and a friend starts rambling about a hand that he had. He was playing limit holdem and raised before the flop with two red aces, and got four callers. Flop came down 5-6-7 two clubs. He bet out, two callers the button raised and everyone called. Turn comes the 2 of clubs. Our hero bets out again, one caller and the button raised, our hero three bet, and…I stopped him right there. Ok you three bet there, were you drunk? Of course not, he replied, then I asked him then what were you thinking, there is no way you have the best hand here! The only two hands you beat are A-7 or a pocket pair. If someone calls a raise before the flop, raises you on the flop and the turn, he’s got aces beat. He’s probably hoping you have aces and you can’t get away from it.  I could think of a ton of hands that he could have that you couldn’t beat. He then agrees with me and we start talking about politics or someone at work that is bugging us. Here’s the funny part, I made an almost identical mistake, only worse, about a week ago. The point here is I know exactly how to play that hand, I just didn’t, and I’m going to examine why.

I’m sure you’ve all heard of tilt before, yes it creeps into your game, and in reality when I started I really only noticed it when it was really bad, but there are several different kinds, and this is one of them. We could start out by the fact that I was playing after work, which starts you off at a disadvantage right there. It was a bad day, so i was pretty irritable before I even got going. Second of all, I didn’t have a hand I could even see a flop with in the first two hours. Third, I forgot my cd player (yes I was playing long before they had ipods) and the guy next to me was driving me nuts. What the hand was isn’t important, but I called four bets on the flop with top pair-decent kicker. I was fed up of not playing and I finally had a real hand, and I was going to play it until the river. I called three bets on the turn and two on the river. Of course I was up against a set and top two, so I was a distant third. So, why could this be so clear at the bar, and so unclear at the table. Simple, too many emotions involved. When you are talking about someone else’s hand and it’s not your money, and you are in a good mood, the right play is completely obvious. When you lose money, it affects your emotions. When you sit for two hours waiting for cards, you lose patience. When you have to put up with people you don’t like, it weakens your defense against tilt creeping in.

Now knowing what happens, where do you go from here. Once i figured this out, the goal was to get to the point where I was thinking like i was at the bar, whenever I played poker. First thing I had to do was to be completely honest with myself, and realize when I wasn’t playing my best game. Also, I had to try to see how long I could play my best game. After deciding this I decided to try an experiment. I started playing poker, one hour a day, no more no less, and playing perfect poker, with a very rigid set of rules, and following them to a tee. Once I was sure I could do that, I went to two hours, looking for things that set off my aggravation level, and doing my best not to let it into my game. After two months I got up to five hours with no problem. When I started doing this, I would play the lowest level game in the house, when i got to five hours, I was playing so well that I was playing in the mid-limit game and doing pretty well. Granted the swings are much larger in those games, and they’d cause much harsher emotional reactions, but I got to the point where if I knew i couldn’t play my best game, I just got up and left.

In reality, playing your best game is the most important part to being a winning poker player. You could be the worlds best poker player, but if you only play your A game 2/3rds of the time, time in the “tiltbox” being a donkey could drain away a lot of the money you worked so hard to get.
 
Until next time…keep improving.