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07.02.04 Burned on the River Sometime last fall I caught an episode or two of the WSOP on ESPN and later I saw a couple reruns of the WPT on the Travel channel. This prompted me to play some poker on Yahoo which within two days left me nonplussed and searching for a superior online outlet for my newfound addiction. Sites like truepoker.com, pokerstars.com and partypoker.com offered a far more realistic game of Texas Hold 'em for free, allowing you to keep track of statistics and monitor your play. I was hooked. Within a month I put $15 on pokerstars and played micro limit .01/.02 no limit games. That 15 turned to 25, then 9, then 31, then 6, then 40, then 25, then 30 . . . you get the picture. I read books about poker, numerous websites and newsgroups about poker, recruited some coworkers for live games and before long, had dropped $100 on partypoker. I was extremely nervous moving from penny blinds into the world of .50/1.00 and did so with trepidation and fear. Boy howdy, did it ever show. I played a very tight and passive game that lost all the money I placed on pokerstars and most of what I had on partypoker. Down to my last 30 or so dollars on partypoker a couple months ago, something clicked. I "got it". While I can't explain what "it" is exactly, I'm pretty sure it has something to do with a combination of understanding pot odds, implied odds, and learning how to shuffle a stack of 12 poker chips with one hand. Discovering that Hold 'em isn't about playing the cards, but playing the players probably didn't hurt as well Over the next couple of months, I turned that $115 into almost $700 and moved up to 2/4 tables with occasional late night forays into 3/6 and some $10 tourneys in which I'd place just short of the money. Never believing I had the game beat, in fact I'm down $40 in the live games I play on Thursday nights, I did have some sense that I knew what I was doing. Just a little. Until tonight. Tonight I lost close to $150. I've read about bad streaks like this, but I'm naive enough about such things to figure they'd not happen to me. Why, I tighten up when the cards go sour on the flop and certain players call to the river! I'm not bullied from a pot when I have the best hand! I don't just call, I raise or fold! I hate bad beat stories and am irritated by people who habitually tell them, but my god. Tonight I had more straights beaten by flushes, flushes beaten by full houses, and full houses beat by four of a kinds than I have ever seen in all my life. (Well, in all my poker life in which I'm only about three or four months old.) But what kills me, is that nearly all of those hands I lost were on the river. Now I know enough to steer clear of super loose fish and for the most part I was hanging out at tables that only saw, on average, a flop less than %35 of the time. What happened to me? There was no excuse for the action tonight. No excuse for my game. None. And no, that's not me above, that's Annie Duke. Lookit those aces. I'll bet she never gets burned on the river.
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