Life and Times of a Poker Addict

I remember when I was teenager always hearing about how much smarter my parents are going to seem when I get to twenty five. Check.

And the all the educational cliches about how to learn from the mistakes of those that have gone before you. Check.

The last one is the best because no matter how much you take it to heart, you still do all those dumb things until you're popped doing it and finally learn. And such is the development of a poker player.

So the slightly ego-boosted assessment of my own skill is that I'm good with the potential to be much better than good. I possess no real barometer of my skill other than for a few months I've been mildly successful playing online and live against friends and random other opponents. That the first two times I sat down and played a live tournament of sorts, I won.

So it's been easy to get down on myself this week as my bankroll has been getting pummelled. Absolutely, one hundred percent pummelled. But by nature I'm more of an optimist so I've been going back over this week trying to decide what the high points were, what I got out of this mess besides losing several hundred dollars.

1) Baby pairs can't stand a reraise from early position.

I've read that plenty of times but was just stupid enough to ignore it last night and got bounced out of the midnight show on FTP on the first hand. Naturally, it was by none other than a pair of Johnnies. [expletive deleted] Johnnies.

2) Ace-King, no matter what, still only makes an Ace high starting hand.

Read that as well, even preached about the stupidity of online players who overplay that hand no more than a few days ago on this very blog. You may currently apply the stupid sign to this guy right here.

3) It's okay to lose, it's going to happen more often than not, so long as you've made the right decision to get into that situation.

In trying to teach my parents some of the finer points of poker, I've had more than a few conversations with my father about it. I tried to find the best analogy to explain where my poker game was at and found it in one of my other passions, golf. I truly think golf is the close cousin of poker. Both "sports" have winners that come out on top of tournaments only a very rare percentage of the time overall. You can do every little thing correctly and sometimes the cards just come wrong or the ball bounces a little askew, and the expected result is demolished.

I played poker pretty regularly for about four months before I ever looked at a poker instruction book. As I've been applying the principles I learn to the style of play I have, my game has kind of vascillated back and forth between very good and very bad. Kind of like when you go get your first lessons in golf and they change your grip. And your stance and your swing and your weighting and just about every thing you can think of until you are so uncomfortable that you'd rather not even play golf. But then a funny thing happens; it becomes natural to do those things. Suddenly your game is ten times better than it was before. Once you've got those basics ingrained you can start working on the nuances of playing better. Shaping different shots, using different clubs in varying situations and generally being more creative and even taking a few more risks.

Discovering this analogy has been a big help to the evolution of my poker skills. When I started playing golf I used to shoot in the 115-120 range for 18 holes. I started lessons, played more and each year for three years I knocked about 10 shots off my score. Once I got down to shooting between 85-95 regularly, I read an article that said only the top 5% of golfers break 90 for eighteen holes. Suddenly you don't feel so ridiculous shooting 90. The pros are the top one tenth of one percent of all golfers. Then I worked on my game and I found I could do a lot more than used to, I could hit shots exactly as I wanted to, moving the ball in different directions just as I had envisioned. And then I started shooting in the low 80's. I was probably ten times better but my score only improved from 87 to 82. I could go out and shoot three or four under par for nine holes but I'd blow up somewhere on the back nine. Or I'd start out poorly on the front nine and then everything would come together on the back. I didn't have a complete game (still don't).

Seven months or so into this little poker adventure I'm on, I have to say that I think I've started finding some of the nuances. My skill has improved a lot but I still have work to do on making all these things I've learned into natural conditions of my game. Some weeks it all makes sense, like it did two weeks ago when I made six final tables online and won twice, making about $2,000. And then there's weeks like this one where I've lost hundreds of dollars. I've made good decisions, bad decisions and just plain gotten into situations where I lost but made the right decision that put me there.

And such are the bumps and bruises of playing poker... of playing golf... of living life...