So I haven’t made a post in a while, which doesn’t mean I haven’t still been playing Poker, it’s just that I’ve had a bit of a downswing.
We all know about variance and how the highs and the lows are part of the game, but I’d not really experienced it that badly before. I had been doing really well at the start of the week but about half-way through I started getting really bad runs, and even when I was getting premium hands I was suffering from bad beats, tilt and feeling that maybe I’m just not cut out for the game.
Here’s my HEM2 graph for the past couple of weeks.
As you can see it was a pretty good gradual increase, which started to flatten out and then descend rapidly, until just a moment ago. Stupid play, or bad luck?
I guess maybe I’ve just reached a point in my own learning curve where it’s started to get a lot steeper, that and probably some pretty good luck with hands in the past.
Something I’ve also begun to understand is never to underestimate a fish. I’m aware of course that being a huge poker newb (hence the name of the blog..) I do throw around the term ‘fish’ a lot, but there are certainly players out there that are worse than me, and I need to treat them with a bit more respect than I do.
Let’s look at some specific examples…
As a note this was in a tournament, I’m not throwing round $1000s of dollars just yet 😉
Anyway, this guy had well over 50 VPIP, he’d been throwing money all over the place and I finally got him into a pot where I thought I had the edge. So when he went All-In on the turn I snap-called.
I’m not 100% sure what the correct response should have been, but at the time I was thinking “I know this guy is awful, he won’t have shit, I’ve got him dominated”.. and look at the result.
Another example (this is from the HEM2 replay feature as I’m pretty sure I rage-quit out of Pokerstars and took a break afterwards):
So as you can see this guy was another pretty huge fish (59% VPIP) and he’d been calling all of my raises every single hand I got him in. He would also often put huge bets in on the River and get folded to (hence his pretty large stack). So I thought I was very secure with my two pair.. he wouldn’t really have a 5 would he? After-all he called my 3BB raise on the BTN and continued to call my full-pot bets..
Yes.. yes he would.
The moral of this post?
I’m not really sure.. I guess I just need to be far more aware of how each hands are played instead of snap-calling things like All-Ins against players I think I’m much stronger than. I also need to consider range far more, especially with ‘fish’ because their ranges can be much larger than one would expect.
If you have any feedback or advice at all please let me know.
Cheers
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