Poker update

Played poker on Saturday for the first time in ages.

When I first started playing, I was making a slight profit. On my first game (of very small stakes), I made about £25. That is of course the whole reason I started liking poker. Recently though, I’ve been getting worse and worse to the point where I’m consistently losing money at the poker table. You’d think that by getting into poker, reading up on it and learning some better techniques you’d become better at it but I’ve discovered that there is a danger of the reverse being true.

By learning about odds, outs, and the miriad of little complexities that arise from such a simple but infinitely fascinating game, I had become incredibly predictable. I had cultivated a table image of an tight player and everyone was aware of that. My brother observed once that he bet high on a hand because he’d forgotten to include the ‘Ian-factor’ in his calculations, i.e. if he’d noticed that I was in the hand that he wouldn’t have played it.

In a recent game I flopped a full house under the gun. Under ideal conditions this would have been a very profitable situation indeed. I casually made a minumum raise and the entire table folded leaving me collecting nothing more than the blinds. The Ian-factor was working very hard against me.

On Saturday though, I made a deliberate effort to shake off the image. I played loose for the first hour or so and made the most of some welcome bluffing opportunities, turning my cards over as much as I could. Some poor hands left me getting flopped to death for a while but it didn’t take long for the Ian-factor to be completely forgotten by the rest of the table. By the end of the night, I’d recovered from an initial drop of £40 and finished £76 in profit.

It was a short-handed game so the odds were leaning slightly towards loose play but it seems that by playing the way I used to when I started playing poker, I made more money, got in on more hands and had a much better game. And it is after all a game; you need to actually play some hands for it to be fun.

Add comment May 15th, 2006