Poker
Originally published at shanefitzsimmons.com. You can comment here or there.
Won $21 at poker last night. Not bad. Won it at a 0.25/0.50 cent table, which is the first time I’ve ever played at that level before.
I’m using a free-trial of some poker software called Poker Tracker, which basically keeps track of all of your hands, games, sessions, winnings and losings, and it also keeps track of all this shit for every player you play with. It’s extremely good software, and it’s shown me exactly how much money I’ve lost (somewhere in the range of ~$300 over the past 6 months). Most of the money I’ve lost has been at the lowest blinds, the 0.05/0.10 cent games. I always had the sneaking suspicion that the reason I was losing there was because I was using advanced plays against shitty players, and I think there’s some merit to that. At those blind levels, it’s basically impossible to bluff most hands. In fact, if your opponent has any kind of hand at all, they’re likely to call. If they don’t have a hand, you can bluff them out of an extremely small pot. And that’s the trouble. Bluffing is a huge part of poker, but because it’s so cheap to call to the river, you’re basically forced to play your cards. Look at it this way, let’s say it’s the river, and the pot is already 2 dollars, and let’s say I’ve got nothing, and while I’m sure my opponent has me beat, I think he’s got a pretty weak holding, like one small pair. If I bet the pot, another 2 dollars, which is a fairly standard move, my opponent is going to look at his cards and, if he has nothing, he’ll fold and I’ll pull in a 2 dollar pot. If he raises or calls, I’m not only going to lose the 2 dollar pot, but I’m also going to lose an extra 2 dollars for my chance to bluff. And because it only costs the guy 2 dollars to call, despite the poor pot odds he’s getting, it’s really not that much money.
So the point is, when you make a successful bluff, you don’t win much money. But when the bluff doesn’t pay off, you lose extra money, and because the blinds are so low, people are going to be calling your bluff more, which means that extra money you’re losing is going to add up.
The second level is 0.10/0.25 cent games, which I tried, and found to be fairly loose too. It seems like the 0.05/0.10 cent games is pre-school. It’s barely a step above free games. 0.10/0.25 is kindergarten, where the n00bs go when they finally want to start to learn the basics.
So I went to level 3, 0.25/0.50, which is significantly tougher. The game I played in last night was very tight, with only a couple of people who came in over the course of my nearly 3 hour session who were particularly loose. One guy in particular who I don’t think went to a showdown once in the 50-ish hands I saw him play, yet he wound up winning quite a bit of money (at least 25 bucks) because he’d just constantly bulldoze over people with enormous raises. If the pot had 3 dollars in it, he’d bet 5, making the pot odds extremely unfavorable. Anybody who’d call him without the nuts would be making a mistake, and it’s extremely rare to have the obvious nuts on the flop, so it’s extremely tough to play with this guy. So I mostly avoided it, except for one time when I felt like I had a pretty strong hand, and when he bet 5 dollars into a 3 dollar pot, I came back at him with a 10 dollar raise. Risky, but it worked, and it showed that he didn’t have the best hands most of the time, he just knew that most of the time, people miss the flop, and he was willing to push people around.
I bought into the game for 50 bucks, and my stack went up and down a lot. Right from the first hand I lost like 3 bucks, and I went down to as low as 30 at least twice, and I went up and down from 50 to 40 several times. It wasn’t until the very ass-end of my three hour session that I had about 57 dollars or so and I won 14 bucks from a pretty big hand that put my winnings for the night at 21 dollars that I decided to quit, calling the session a success.
The shitty thing about this night, is because my stack kept going well under my buy-in, but I kept fighting tooth-and-nail to get it back up to 50 only to have it drop again, is that I probably won closer to 120 bucks last night, I just happened to lose 99 also, which kept me down.
Anyway, it might have just been the table I was playing at. It was a tough table, but maybe the next time I play it’ll be even tougher, and I might blow my entire stack. Or hell, maybe I’ll take a bad beat and go broke on a hand I could have sworn I should have won. It happens. However, despite how much money it costs to play at this level, I don’t think I’ll be going back to the 0.05/0.10 cent games again.