Hold Em Authority - Texas Hold Em Strategy and advice for all levels of players

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 entry was posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 4:47 am and is filed under Poker Mentality, Tournament Poker Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.