Back to Basics

Ok, I know a lot of people who read this blog know me, so they know what's been going on with me lately but for those of you who don't know me that well, let me explain to you why I haven't updated this thing for a metric year.

First of all, I took a break from poker. The game wasn't fun for me anymore, and I always said when it stopped being fun, there's no point in me playing. I took a month or two off and then came back to realize...

I fucking sucked.

Apparently the combination of my time off and my super aggresive style had basically turned me into a play-every-hand-douchebag incapable of folding even the most remote draw... awesome. The only comforting fact in this whole equation is I still have what seems to be my in-born voice in the back of my mind that tells me when I'm about to get into some serious trouble, unfortunately, I still don't listen to it. So I decided I need to go back to basics. I have to re-close up my hand selection and start playing tighter. Obviously the way I was playing before had room for improvement anyway otherwise I would have more than 10 (not that I don't love you guys you know you're fucking awesome) people reading this blog. So I said fuck it, I had just finished Phil Gordon's The Real Deal, which is probably one of the better poker books I've read, and I decided to completely overhaul my game.

The first step to this is discipline, which any of you know for me in never something that I've had an abundant supply of. It can be god damn excruciating sometimes to a K-2 suited to a raise in NLHE, (I dun curr what you all say, those calls used to win me massive pots.) but I must learn to do it. The second part is just going back to the basic math of the game. Folding my draws if I am not getting the right price. Not factoring in backdoor draws as a reason to call (in NLHE). When reading The Real Deal I came across a particular concept. It's a concept I had read in thousands of other pages I've read on poker. It's a phrase I heard a million times, but for some reason it hadn't sunk in until I read it in Gordon's book:

"Everytime you make a mistake, your opponent wins money, everytime you get your opponent to make a mistake, you win money," (to paraphrase)

Now I always knew what this meant, but I don't think I understood it. This is the concept that balances out variance. It is what makes winning players winning players over the long haul. It's what makes poker a game of skill. It's what makes the grinders at 5/10 games so FUCKING BORING... but winners. Until now, not gonna lie, I didn't get it. When I first started playing the game I just followed it because I knew it was the right thing to do. Unfortunately I think in order to become truly great in anything I believe you have to get outside the box. Which I did. I got way outside the box... like if I stood on the roof of my apartment and looked around, I couldn't even see the fucking box, then I realized, I needed to get back inside that damn box.

Don't get my wrong, I think my little experiments that I made definitely improved the non-mathmatical portion of my game. I feel I'm better at reading the context of the board than I have ever been and I know I'm better at putting people on hands than I've ever been. Those are things that won't go away. The problem basically comes down to this. When you watch the movies about poker and you watch poker on TV they always say things like "for the truly great players, the cards don't matter."

This is simply just not fucking true. Maybe, in one hand, if you know exactly what your other opponent has, the cards don't matter. Maybe in one instance if you picked up a rock solid read on your opponent, in that particular hand, the cards don't matter. But in the long haul, in the "trenches" as Action Dan would say (just started that book, I'm more excited about it than a Senior taking a Freshman chick to prom), the cards matter. No matter how good you are, you can't outplay your opponent every hand. You can't even outplay your opponent on one of every 5 hands if he or she has any fucking idea what they're doing. Now that I said that, hopefully I'll be able to appreciate it... and listen to that damn voice in the back of my mind.