Poker Update
Originally published at shanefitzsimmons.com. You can comment here or there.
As another aside, it’s been a while (I think) since I’ve done a poker update. I invested some money into some software that attaches itself to the room I’m playing in to give me the proper pot odds and odds of making my hand. Pretty expensive software, but I figure I’ve already sank $300 dollars directly into poker, and probably another $100 into books. Paying about 80 bucks more for decent software could be a good investment.
So far it seems to be the case. My problem doesn’t seem to be that I don’t know how to bet, or push people around or do any number of other things. I think my strategy and the tactics I impliment tends to work for me pretty well. However, what I lack is a good handling of the basic mathematics involved in poker, which has caused me to blow a lot of mone on some pretty marginal situations. Marginal situations are the bulk of situations you run into in poker, it’s rare that you know you’re so completely beaten or that you have a monster hand, but it’s extremely common to not know exactly what your opponent is holding, but having a hand of some sort that you’re not sure where you stand. Because of that, and because I’m pretty crappy with math, I’ve discovered that I bleed a lot of chips on marginal hands I shouldn’t be betting. I frequently seem to think I have a better chance of hitting my hand than I really do, and even though I’ve been actively searching for this two days with this software has shown me just how wrong I am. The day before I bought the software I had lost something like $25 in one day. The day I bought the software I cut my losses to just about $7, and the day after I bought it I made about $9 in profit. I’m not going to be able to pay my rent any time soon with my poker winnings, and I have no dilusions about that, but it’s good to know that I have a solid foundation of poker strategy, and the only thing I’m lacking is a basic knowledge of mathematics.