This post has the potential to get ugly in a hurry, but I’m going to attempt to keep it as civil as possible.

I wanted to address something that one might not think about, but probably should, and that is: if you are a male, what runs through your head when you sit down and realize you have to play against a woman?

Speaking from experience, I can tell you two things:

1) I’m much more apt to fold a hand if a woman bets aggressively at me, because I sometimes feel that women in general are much less aggressive at the poker table than men are simply because they seem to be the same way in the real world.

2) I’m much more apt to get distracted and be thrown off my game if said woman is attractive.

Obviously, these are two stupid mentalities to take towards women, but sometimes they are extremely difficult to get away from. It is very easy to develop a rapport with women at the poker table, which is most likely part of the strategy they use to extract chips from you. If you really want to play the game correctly, you have to be willing to bust this woman even if you do hit it off. As for point 2 above, if you two are really meant to be together, she’ll wait for you somewhere in the casino after you bust her so you can talk more after the tournament or during the break, so stop staring at her and play your damn cards!

These two reasons illustrate exactly why you SHOULD respect women at the table, because they can use these two stereotypes to the fullest advantage, and the smart ones absolutely do.There is some interesting content on this poker blog namely a series of ten great examples that have become successful with the help of their looks and their game, and I’m guessing these women make more than I do in a year over the course of 24 hours.

If you respect women in life, there should be no reason to give them any less respect at the poker table. If you don’t respect women in life, women at the poker table are probably the least of your concerns at this point.

*************

Enjoy the weekend, but please don’t waste a day going to the Stardust in Vegas, beacuse it is no longer standing. Kind of a sad day in poker news if you ask me, but I guess there’s probably a couple other options for you in Vegas if you really look hard enough.

Interesting title, I know.

Anyway, it seems that recently I’ve been in a mindset in which I think that whoever my opponent is, he/she must have the nuts, always. For example, if the board reads 9QK and I have AK, I automatically assume my opponent has 10 J or KQ. One of many problems with this mindset is not getting max value out of a hand that very well could be ahead.

Another problem I have that goes along with not getting max value out of a hand is thinking that my opponent always has a hand that could end up better than mine. Obviously this is the case most of the time, but I’m thinking in terms of open-ended straight draw, flush draw, etc. that have a very legitimate chance of beating me. Again, with this mindset, I’ll probably bet the flop way too big for my opponent to call, thus not getting max value out of the hand. Sure, I won the hand, but sometimes it’s taking a few risks that propel you to a tournament victory.

Especially in online play, you have to believe that players are going to put their money in the pot with far less than the nuts far more often than a typical live player would.  Be smart about your choices and play the hand through in your head before you decide that you’re beat - it may just reveal an answer that you’re not expecting.

If you read my last post, you know that I just won an online poker tournament. It was a sizable tournament, with 350+ people playing in it. Needless to say, I’m pretty pumped about it, and I feel like I’m at the top of my game. Numerous people have either told me or others that after winning an online tournament, beware!

Why?

Well, they say, because you won’t win anything for a long period of time after that.

That’s ridiculous - if the online poker sites focused on making sure you lose after a sizable win, they would be expending unnecessary time and energy on something that is completely immoral and illegal.

It may seem that you might not win after winning a poker tournament, and a couple of reasons could come into play.

1. You feel that everyone in the poker world should know that you have just won a poker tournament, and you are a force to be reckoned with. This line of thinking makes you a little bit more aggressive - a bad call here, a dumb raise there, and before you know it, you’re on a losing streak.

2. You think you’re invincible - You’ve just won a poker tournament, things are good. You can’t win a tournament without playing well, right? Maybe this means that anything you do turns to gold now. All of a sudden, you start playing more hands because you know good things are going to happen, and before you know it, your stack is whiddled away to nothing because of your not necessarily aggressive, but loose, style of play.

3. Finally, and probably most logical - the law of averages are starting to bite you. If you win a poker tournament, that means that at each point all your chips were in the pot, you won. Chances are, it also means you survived a few big pots that went to showdown. If you win 3 coin flips and lose 1 throughout a tournament, you’re doing pretty well. In the next tournament you play though, you could win 0 and lose 2. You may think this is terrible luck, but the last two tournaments you’ve played, you’re exactly where you are supposed to be in coin flips won, 3-3.

So, Beware! But don’t beware because of the online poker room trying to cheat you. Beware of your own playing style and make sure it doesn’t change from your tournament win to the next tournament. Beware of the law of averages evening things out for you.

Best of luck at the tables.

This is from Checkitdown, a blog about my personal poker experiences. I think it is a very important article, not just for a beginning poker player who thinks it’s all about the cards, but for the intermediate and advanced players who may be struggling with their emotions as well.

***
“I recently deposited some money into PokerStars. I’ve consistently lost on PokerStars, but I used to play there when I was much less experiened and much more stupid. This time I felt like I could really take advantage of some of the fish that were swimming around out there. The first night I ended down about 15 bucks. The second night I ended down 50 bucks. I lost the first sit and go on the third day and lost what confidence I had left. At that point, I should have pulled the rest of my money out, because a lack of confidence is never found in an equation of winning.

Confidence is vital in so many different things in life; sports, academics, socially, and I believe it pertains to poker as well. I entered the next sit and go expecting to lose because of all the bad beats I’d taken and the poor plays I’d made, and that’s exactly what I did. I changed my game plan because I was afraid to get beat. I tightened up, folded a lot of very strong hands, and eventually was forced to go all in at an inopportune time. This became a pattern, and I eventually lost all my money. As stupid as it sounds, I looked to my lack of success as a result of the site I was playing on, beacuse “I can never win on PokerStars.” I am not blaming the site for forcing bad beats upon me, but when I’m up almost $8000 on one site and down $600 on another, I feel like I’m jinxed on that site.

I hated doing it, but I put more money back into UB. I feel more comfortable at that site, and in turn that gives me more confidence. The first sit and go I played, I sat down at the table feeling I was the best player there. I didn’t win, but I felt a helluva lot better about my play than I did with any of the tourneys I played on Stars.

I think one of the toughest things in poker is to remain confident even when luck isn’t on your side. Just because you are losing does not mean you are playing poorly, and when the chips continue to go in the wrong direction, it’s easy to feel you are doing something wrong.

In summary, ya gotta have confidence if you want to win at poker. If you’ve lost it, stop playing for awhile, if you’ve never had it, stop playing forever.

I believe that this article addresses a couple extra issues that I will write on in the future: staying in your comfort zone, and dealing with bad luck. Remember, this game isn’t all about the cards. If it were all about the cards, you could stick the poker tables right next to blackjack.

This is another one of those articles from CheckItDown, my other blog. Being honest with oneself is very important on the road to becoming a solid poker player, and like it or not, this is an issue that has to be addressed - enjoy!

Taking A Break

Before these past 3 months, I never really understood what poker players meant by being in a funk for more than a week. In the year and a half of playing, I’d never experienced any sort of long term losing streak. These past three months, however, has put me on the brink of losing control.

It all started after a 3rd place finish in a $30 tournament on UB. Since then, that money has vanished. What’s the problem Joe, you’ve broke even over a 3 month period? That may be true, but I haven’t taken profit out of a website for 3 months, and I’ve never ever had that happen, even when I first started playing. Lately, if I put $100 in and take out $50, I consider it a victory.

In the early stages, I was taking a lot of bad beats. Bad beats happen, and I understand that, but the amount of bad beats I was dealing with was taking a toll on my emotions. I was afraid to play hands for fear of beats, and eventually I was blinding myself out of tournaments. I started to realize this, then pressed too much in tournaments, getting my money in frequently with the worst cards.

I lose and I lose, but I still feel like I’m better than 9 out of every 10 players at any stakes. Call me arrogant, cocky, confident, but that’s how I feel, so I figure that if I move up to bigger stakes, I can make my money back a little quicker and suffer fewer bad beats. This just started to compound the problem as you might imagine.

Today I officially ended up breaking even for the semester, so I’ve uninstalled UltimateBet and won’t be playing for a long time, who knows how long. Many of you that know me also know that I always guarantee I won’t be playing for X period of time, and it usually turns out to be less than half that time before I start playing again. Well folks, this time I don’t have a choice, I can’t afford to play anymore. The money I won in that $30 tourney was leftover money from the summer, and now that I’ve burned all that, I have no money I feel like I can afford to lose.

No matter how high the stakes, how out of control, and how many bad beats I took, I feel very confident about my skills, and I feel more confident about myself as a person to know that I am and always have played with only the poker money I could afford to lose. As close as I am to the line of “gambling addiction”, I feel like I haven’t and won’t cross it, because I’m not playing with money that I can’t afford to lose.

So until I get a full time job, the stakes I play, if any, are going to be quite small. Best of luck to all the poker players out there, and I hope that when you hit a bad streak, you can control your emotions and your abilities a little bit better than I did.

“F&%*ing UB!” If people aren’t blaming the site they’re playing on, they’re blaming another player. What would be so bad about looking to the way YOU played the hand to see if YOU did something wrong?

******

In one of my graduate classes we learned some of the attributes of a critical thinker. One of these attributes was open-mindedness. I see it at almost every table I’m at - someone will say something like, how can you play that hand, or how can you call that? Being open-minded would allow a person like this to realize that it might not be all the other player’s fault - he/she might have something to do with it as well.

******

Let’s take an example.

Let’s say you’re dealt QQ in middle position and you raise to 3X the BB. The BB calls. The flop comes 10 8 3. You bet out about half the pot, and the BB calls. Turn is a J. You decide that the BB might now have a solid hand, so you check as well. The river card is another 8. The BB bets, you call, and the BB flips 8 K for trips. You decide to berate this player, wondering how he calls a bet like that preflop and postflop. Maybe now would be a good time to step back and realize you gave this person a free card on the turn. Had you not done that, especially with another overcard to that person’s 8, he/she might’ve gone away.

******
If you must get mad, get mad at yourself, and learn from it. Nothing good ever comes out of berating another player; it just gives that player more satisfaction when he/she knocks you out of the tournament.

What is tilt, and how does it happen? (By the way, I’m not talking about the terrible TV series that ran on ESPN, and yes, I did watch every episode.) Let’s get something straight right away - it’s not just being mad. I have a friend that we rag on constantly for going on tilt easily. He says to us, “I don’t go on tilt, I just get mad.” He got double the criticism after he said that, but honestly, he does have a point. You can be mad and not be on tilt. However, I don’t think you can be on tilt and not be mad/upset.*******

Tilt really means changing the way you play (for the worse) after you take a bad beat or do something stupid.
This type of mindset can be very very dangerous to you and your bankroll. Are there ways to avoid going on tilt? I really think it depends on the type of person you are. It is obviously easier to avoid tilt if you are an easy-going person. On the other hand, if you are very high-strung, you will get mad, and may very well go on tilt on a regular basis.

*****

I believe that the first step to avoid going on tilt, (and I’m going to sound like one of those ______ anonymous programs) is realizing and admitting you have a problem. If you can’t step up to the plate and say, I get crazy mad and play like shit when I take a bad beat or make a dumb move, well, you’re going to continue going on tilt.

*****

I think the second step is taking a few hands off (unless it’s AA or KK ) to regain your composure. What is the harm in that? Just get away from the computer screen for a few minutes, go punch a wall or throw something through a window (kidding, but you get the point). Make sure when you come back to the computer you are calm and ready to play YOUR game.

*****

If these two steps don’t help instantly, don’t panic. You don’t become a fantastic poker player overnight, and you probably won’t stop tilting overnight either. It may be a gradual process, and that’s ok, as long as you’re making strides in the right direction. This leads me to the third and final step, which I feel is setting goals for your tilting. If you remain on tilt for one less hand each time you go on tilt from here on out, would you agree that you’re improving? If that’s what you gotta do, that’s what you gotta do.

*****

You know yourself better than I do, so do what works for you. I’m just trying to point you in the right direction.

*****

Good luck at the tables.