Learned what ??? is

Well, it's been an interesting couple of sessions. Friday has been an interesting night for me. My wife gives me a sleep in on Saturday, so I use it as an excuse to stay up way too late. In more recent times I play poker and drink. Now this has been a horrible combination, and I've probably lost 1000's doing this, but I worked out the drinking isn't the problem :)

The problem is much bigger poker wise, and I was able to experience this Sunday night. You see I've finally cracked poker. I am now able to generate extra income and keep my mortgage from killing my family, I kid you not.

You see before my goals to success went:
1. Learn poker
2. ???
3. Get rich

Now I've finally realised what number 2 is and why it's so important. It's "PAY FUCKING ATTENTION YOU SNOBBY DICKHEAD"!!!! Seriously. If I bump into someone who says they are learning poker, I would absolutely 100% of the time tell them to watch the other players 100%, don't take anything for granted, pay 100% attention.

So I go back a bit. I think I learned 1 pretty well before grinding a few months, 3-4 tabling at a small profit. The problem always came when I got minraised, or was floated, or faced a big river bet and didn't know what to do. I've played 85 hands against this guy and my notes are zilch, now I'm facing a river bet with top pair. This isn't poker anymore. This is playing your hands only, or level 1 thinking. How can you bluff a river or get a player to call your value bet when you don't even know how they play? Stats are important, but 19/16/3 tells me nothing about whether someone will thinly value bet the river.

What's more how can you call yourself a poker player if you are playing your hands. 4 tabling purely stats is fucking boring. It's not that it's not profitable, it's just that it's not poker and it's not interesting. The whole point is to beat your opponents, and over time they'll get the same cards as you. You are relying on them making bigger mistakes, which they do usually, but in the end this is still just a very small part of a successful players range, and I think the good (not great, just the good) players are able to take solid lines in every situation, because they can make assumptions about who they are playing, based on things they've seen.

OK, so back to playing drunk. My problem was I wasn't reading players well, then playing drunk. So I'm already a breakeven player by purely hoping stats will help, now add some drinks. Now I'm a losing player at any session. Now factor in that tilt is much more likely when you make stupid mistakes, and stupid mistakes are likely to get you more upset when drunk, and being drunk stops you from making a sensible decision, like quitting a session when down and playing bad. Now that's not good.

So on Friday I was about to play, then I remembered the warm up routine, and stopped and did that. It was great. I had a couple of drinks down, but it cleared up my mind setting some goals and I had a pretty dodgy plan based on the previous nights play. Get a profit, move up a level, and so on, until I go broke. That's right, if I'm playing $25/$50 by the end so be it. If I go broke playing 25c/50c so be it. The intention was always to buy in short too. So I started NL25 with $15. It was a grind to be honest, but made it up to $45, so bought into NL50 for $30. I played roughly 43/38/3 style all night, On this table, it didn't take long, with a few players trying to take me on and playing way too predictably. It's fair to say I was reading players magically this night.

So NL100 and $50 on the table. Again I started getting action, and even comments at this table. I always seemed to be able to bluff effectively, until I ran AK on AKxx into AQ, and he thought I was bluffing :) Up to $250 on the table after that hand, so it's up to NL200. It's very safe to say the tables had played very tight weak up until this point and this is where I expected some real aggro grinders, but no. Again my 43/38 style seemed to keep everyone guessing and folding. In this whole run I don't remember losing a 3 bet pot! I doubled up when AQ shoved me preflop and I had AK and held on. Eventually I grinded up to $450 on that table. Now at this point I looked at a very pretty figure in my Cashier, and really should have stopped. Why? Because I'm results oriented? No, because I was getting very tired and was starting to lose my focus big time. Like I was drastically tired. I opened up $2/$4, and showed down the 2nd best hand 4 times in a row here. Not so much coolers, more the minimum hand someone could have and still call and be good against my hand. But again this was readless, and I was trying too quickly to run over players, which without reads against good players, mainly because I was tired. I lost all my profits, but was really happy to have run over every table up to NL400 :)

Really happy with my play that night, because I was playing poker. I was reading players and putting players on exact hands on turns and rivers, which feels brilliant. "A game" while drunk? Pretty much.

Anyway, inspired a real look into grinding 6 max again.