Friday, September 11, 2009

The Coming of Age of a Showdown Monkey

I've recently decided that I need to put more work into my game, looking for leaks and trying to determine if I've picked up any bad habits over the last few months. It's common in poker for running bad to lead to playing bad, for several reasons. The most obvious is that when you lose, you're upset, and when you're upset, you might make bad decisions. Another, more subtle, reason is that if you are always losing that means that you're seeing your opponents show up with hands in the top of their ranges a disproportionate amount of the time. This could systematically cause you to change the way you play by making you miss value bets, or worse, assume that they can't always have start making some bad call downs. In an effort to investigate if I've fallen pray to the last possibility, I posted a thread series on two plus two to get some honest feedback on my play. Here then are the hands.

Part 1 - I call 14 times then river a straight
Part 2 - I somehow showdown K2o
Part 3 - I call down meekly with jacks
Part 4 - I make an ace-high call down
Part 5 - I try to win a ginormous pot with one pair

The general consensus on the forum was that these hands ranged from OK to terrible, with most falling decidedly in between. I'm left in a conundrum. I used to fold more, and I used to win. Even if I believe that folding less is correct, if I am unable to apply such a strategy correctly, would it not be better to going back to folding too much? Or was I just getting lucky when I folded too much? Questions, questions, questions....

1 comment:

The blindman said...

Could you really b/f the river on the first hand? The pot is pretty big, and I have seen enough crazy raises in these situations that I couldn't fold a nut non flush. Do you know your villain well enough?