Self-flagellation

My two and a half week sojourn of solitude ends today. I don’t think I have made the best of it, particularly since Friday. I haven’t watched any DVDs – well, one – or read very much, or written very much. Poker has been good of course – but I have got a bit unfocussed over the last few days thanks to silly personal things.

Yesterday was a case in point, when I threw away a reasonable win at five card stud through complacency and a lack of patience and application. The wins at stud or heads-up are rarely, if ever, as exciting (eg as large!) as the PLO wins, and I have started to not treat those games with respect as a result. Which is ridiculous, because I want to WIN. Not to have fun and make fancy plays – well, okay, I do want to have fun as well – but to WIN. A ten buck win is infinitely preferable to a lazy, foolish, needless twenty buck loss.

Unless I want to force myself into playing higher limits, which I am loathe to do, then I have to regain my remorseless focus on grinding out profits. I intend to make my next session of five card stud incredibly tight. Ridiculously tight. People will still call me down, will still call bets on third and fourth when they cannot beat my board.

I read about ‘the Delta principle’ in somebody’s blog yesterday (sadly I forget which blog), which simply states that to beat a game you need to play differently to the other nine (or whatever) guys. In five card stud I think this is very true. With so much of your hand on display, so little hidden, it is possible to play ‘correctly’ quite a lot. But hardly anybody does, because that means extreme tightness. I drift into it myself, calling bets that I know I shouldn’t - and it is a compounding error because it is very hard to fold on the river in a game where people often (correctly) bet Ace or King high.

Well, ‘Delta principle’ by my side, I am going to embrace that extreme tightness tonight, or whenever I next play. And I am all but certain that if I can do it, if I can stop frittering bets on hopeful bets and hopeless calls, then the game will be very profitable.

That’s unless it is short-handed by the way. I find that five-handed or, better, four-handed, I do very very well in the game – way better than at a full table. Suddenly it seems to pay off to pay attention to the exposed and folded cards, it becomes easier to read hands, easier to value-bet or call down bluffs, easier to occasionally bluff.

Enough with the five card stud already!

So, I need a win. There hasn’t been a real enticing Omaha game for a few days, and my other games have gone badly for reasons discussed above. Yesterday continued the trend.

5 card stud: Blew back a decent win through impatience and fancy play syndrome.

Heads-up limit hold ‘em: Annoying. Played a weak guy. He got ahead early with a couple of big hands, such as flopping a straight when I had Aces. I battered him to get ahead myself in a few minutes, he caught a nice river to go back marginally in front and immediately left.

PLO Sit and Go: Fifth. Again. One guy had 2/3 the chips with five left. He raised from the button and with a semi-decent hand I decided it was time to show some fight and hopefully gather some chips. I re-raised pot, putting me virtually all-in. He called, and I flopped a decent straight draw, slightly better than a mere open-ender. He proved to have nothing on the flop, but hit a runner runner straight that didn’t join mine up, and that was that. I was a huge favourite, so that’s fine. I am down after ten or eleven of these $10+1 games. Not too concerned, but they certainly are nowhere near as easy as the $5 games.

Heads-up PLO: Yes, I tried a bit of this when I got home drunk. My notes told me this guy liked to show bluffs and was a reasonable player. I proceeded to batter him for a while with aggression and good starting hand selection. I was up about $30 (he sat with $20 initially) at one point, when he hit runner-runner flush versus my flopped trips to reverse the damage. I quit (wish I hadn’t had to) up about $7 in the end.

That foray into heads-up PLO has got me thinking. I believe I have a decent feel for heads-up PLO; I’ve been heads-up in a number of the sit and goes (although of course that is somewhat different) with reasonable success, and I spent an evening a few weeks ago dealing hands to myself and exploring how the game works one-on-one. So, I think I will play that as and when I get a chance, especially since the guy I was playing wasn’t a bad player but I felt well in control. One concern there is the rake; I will have to look closely at that in my next session.

And so on to ‘real life’. I got chatted up at the bar last night by a rather fit young blonde thing. However, she was rather drunk and also very young (I guess eighteen max) and didn’t seem like my type of person. And I was there to drink and talk rubbish with my mate, not leave him sitting there while I chatted to a girl. And besides, I am trying celibacy for a bit.

This morning I was very late for work, having stayed up ludicrously late and left the cleaning up of the house to the morning! I got a slight telling off, which is quite a stretch for my mild boss. I felt like ‘screw you, nobody tells me what to do!’ and started dreaming the dream again, even though my results and bankroll make it patently ludicrous.

I also felt a little bad about it, but mainly because I am a mess of a man. Disorganised, feckless, irresponsible, lazy, selfish, immature, self-indulgent and a master procrastinator. I would feel a lot better about myself if I could just muster the discipline to get out of bed on time and give up smoking. Those two small things would make quite a difference.