HugePoker

In all the time I’ve been playing poker seriously, I’ve read a lot of books, learned a lot of poker theory, watched a lot of opponents to decipher their patterns and tendencies and tells, and sometimes I’m able to convince myself that I’ve become a decent poker player, but there’s a hurdle I can’t seem to clear which seems like the simplest stupidest thing until I actually set my mind to fixing it. I’ll be sailing along, maybe with a big chip stack, maybe only average, but certainly in healthy shape … an opponent checks to me on the flop and I don’t really have anything but his check seems weak so I take a stab and bet the flop. OK that’s fine - I win a lot of pots that way. But this time my opponent calls and the turn doesn’t help me and the guy checks again. So now the guy HAS to be weak, right? If I bet 2/3 of the pot here surely he’ll fold, yes? And anyway I only have to be right 1/2 the time for this to be a clearly profitable move … So I bet, and he calls again. CRAP! But then he checks the river, too. OK now COME ON! He can’t have a big hand, can he?? Actually he probably has a busted flush draw … YEAH! That’s it! He called me on the flop and the turn with a flush draw, and he missed on the river, and now OF COURSE he’ll fold when I bet, right? In fact I don’t have to even bet all that much - half the pot should do it - and if I bet half the pot he only needs to fold a little more than 1/3 of the time for it to be a profitable play on my part. And absolutely he’s going to fold way more than 1/3 of the time here, right? Right? So I fire half pot, he calls with second pair or something, and at the end of the hand I’ve pissed away 3 big blinds before the flop, 5BB on the flop, 12BB on the turn and 20BB on the river … bye bye 40BB … and my once healthy stack is now in the ICU with an itchy catheter.

Now I’m all in favor of bluffing … bluffing is fun and profitable and makes you feel like a total badass and it’s what makes poker poker and all that. And I don’t mind so much if I think through what my opponent’s hand range ought to be, make a guess at how much of that range can’t possibly call my bet, and then fire off the bet … even if I’m wrong (or I’m right about his hand but wrong about his ability to fold it). If I think things through, play the hand back in my head, see what makes sense and what doesn’t, consider what sort of table-image I have and try to guess at whether my opponent is too dim-witted to fold third pair … and then decide bluffing is the best option … and then get called and lose a big pot … I can live with that. But when my thought process is almost as non-existent as what I described in the previous paragraph, then I start kicking myself.

I’ve tried lots of tricks to avoid this self-sabotage … I’ve put the mouse out of reach in between hands so I would have to make a deliberate physical move in order to play the hand … I’ve put post-it notes on my monitor – actually once I tried putting a post-it note over my cards, again so that every hand would involve a conscious act … I’ve kept a journal while playing, forcing myself to write down every time I bet a hand that isn’t legitimately strong enough to warrant the bet, whether I win or lose the hand. A while ago I tried talking to myself out loud, describing every hand in the tournament, forcing myself to talk through every decision as if I were explaining it to someone. This made me feel a little like a crazy person, but it also seemed like the best idea yet, and it felt like it helped … but like so many things, I just couldn’t stick with it. More recently I’ve landed on a more elaborate version of the same idea. I’ve found a piece of screen recording software which I turn on when I start the tournament, and I clip a microphone to my shirt and speak into it, as if I’m recording one of those instructional videos that I watch so often on PokerXFactor.com. I have some thought that if I were to win a big tournament or run into some unusual hands, I might post them here, or give them to friends, but most of my brain knows that they’re likely to just sit on my hard drive until I do some spring cleaning and delete them. In addition to forcing me to talk through each hand, recording has an added benefit – shame and embarrassment! When I record, even though I know that the recording probably won’t ever see the light of day, it still feels like I have an audience that I’m explaining myself to, who will surely feel disappointed (disillusioned? Crestfallen? Betrayed?) if I do something stupid that I can’t even explain.

There’s gotta be a self-help book in here somewhere: “How I made a million dollars exploiting my own fear of shame and humiliation.” Catchy title, no?

So it seems to help my play. I don’t think I’ve made any of those crazy multi-barrel bluffs while recording a video, and I’m pretty sure I haven’t had to say anything like “Oh my god, how could I do that? What an idiotic play I just made. Sorry. Wow I really suck.” Not that I haven’t made (and talked about) mistakes – quite often I make a play and then pretty quickly say “yeah that probably wasn’t the right choice … I didn’t think about the fact that blah blah blah blah…”, and there are worse moments where in the heat of battle I mutter into the microphone “I just don’t know what to do here”, which carries with it its own little sting of embarrassment. But all that is part of playing poker more thoughtfully and less impulsively/compulsively/knee-jerkily. If I talk about a mistake or pronounce that I don’t know what to do in a particular situation, hopefully I’ll think about that situation and try to have a better plan the next time it comes up.

I had a pretty good day yesterday – in the morning I played and won 2 “Step 4” single-table tournaments ($215 buyin), pulling in about $1000, lost a Step 4 in the afternoon, but then won a Step 5 in the evening for a $2100 prize “ticket”. I recorded all of them and I think they came out OK. I’m still figuring out how to use the software, and I don’t have a ton of webspace to host these things, so I’m not going to throw a bunch of streaming video at you, but something funny happened when I was recording a big tournament today, so I’ll experiment with posting a two-minute snippet for your amusement. This won’t be all that high on the poker content, so even non-poker players might be amused by it, if only to see a small slice of this ridiculous thing I do for a living. Plus I’ll get a feel for whether it actually works to publish a video here for other people to watch … Let me know if you have trouble getting it to work on your computer.

A little setup is in order … a couple of days ago Pokerstars began their World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP). I hadn’t played any of the events, but today was event #6, $530 buyin, $3 million guaranteed prize pool. This tournament was going to have a *LOT* of satellite players and seemed like something I really should play. When I woke up this morning I was a little alarmed to discover that our cable internet was down – pretty horrible news for me on a Sunday. I scrambled around trying to set things up so that I could use my cell phone as a modem to connect my computer to the internet, but I decided that would just be too risky to play a $530 tournament relying on my cell phone to keep me connected possibly for 12 hours. Just when I’d given up hope the cable came back on and I was back in business. My tournament was starting at 1:30, but at 11:30AM was the high-roller event #5 - $10,000 buyin, $3 Million guaranteed prize pool, possibly the biggest buyin online event ever. I certainly wasn’t playing that, but I knew that my new poker-celeb friends Vanessa Rousso and Chad Brown would be in it (as well as in my little $530 event – they’re both sponsored pros with PokerStars, so Pokerstars buys them in to all the events). As it was starting I got email from my friend Mark saying that he was in Vanessa and Chad’s hotel room in Barcelona and that he was playing the $530 event, and that they were all watching my tournament table as well. All of them played in the APPT tournament in Macau a couple of days ago, and then hopped on planes from Macau to Barcelona to hit the European Poker tour event there, just in time to check in to their hotel rooms and play poker on the internet on their laptops. Glamorous.

So the tournament starts and I’m doing pretty well, up and down but nothing too drastic. 7351 players, 1st place is $452,000. In all the emailing with Mark and Vanessa and fiddling with the internet connection I somehow don’t even think about recording the tournament, and at any rate I make it through to the first break in decent shape. But in the second hour … I misplace my brain somewhere and … I do it again. The massive triple-barrel gratuitous bluff, crippling my stack. Hanging on by my fingernails I somehow survive to the second break, during which I remember that the massive triple-barrel gratuitous bluff is exactly what my new recording regimen is supposed to help me avoid. So I fire up the SW a few minutes into level three, and immediately I get involved in a big hand. It’s ironic after all this talk of avoiding big bluffs, that the only hand I’m going to show you is one I recorded, and one in which my play basically amounts to a semi-bluff…

Again, if you try to watch this and it doesn’t work, let me know. If you have problems viewing, you might need to make sure that you have the latest version of “Flash” (video player software) on your computer. And for some reason the audio volume levels are never high enough, so you may need to turn up your computer speakers.

Without further ado, CLICK HERE

And then, for bonus irony value, here’s my final hand of the tournament (I wasn’t recording, so this is just the plain old hand replayer)…

CLICK HERE

Live by the diamond flush, die by the diamond flush…

-huge