Good Players Are More Often In Statistically Surprising Situations
I've been playing pretty well the last week or so; nearly all NL HE. I've been very happy with my play, and somewhat happy with the results. I've gotten very good at manipulating the pot size so that people get all their money in when I have flopped a very good hand. I haven't been all-in with the worst of it in the last 20-30 all-in situations I've been in. Yet, I didn't win them all, of course, and I find this quote calming when it goes the wrong way:
If you are an excellent player, people are going to draw out on you a lot more than you're going to draw out on them because they're simply going to have the worst hand against you a lot more times than you have the worst hand against them.
&mdash Bobby Baldwin
Added to this, I also note that if you're a pretty good player, you're going to be particular good at tricking your opponents to take the worst of it, and thus adding to the times your hand can be outdrawn. The nice thing about NL HE against limit HE is that you almost always can set up these situations in the former where your opponent is mathematically incorrect in calling/raising you. Often in limit HE, you get the “I'm correct in betting and he's correct in calling” situation.
I also noticed no one has started keeping a running tally of how many days remain until banks must comply with the UIGEA. I am enough of a long-time net.citizen to recall when Internet countdown sites were still the rage, and I thought about adding a retro one to my journal, but for the moment, I'll just note that the final day of free Internet poker banking appears to be Wednesday 10 July 2007. Only 185 days to go. Here's a Perl one liner to tell you how many days to go:
perl -e 'use Date::Manip; print Delta_Format(DateCalc("today", DateCalc("13 October 2006", "+ 270 days")), 0, "%dt\n");'