Excessive Variance

I haven’t updated for a couple days because I’ve only gotten one live session in and I’ve been getting a cold the last couple days, so I’m catching up. I went to the card room Monday expecting to play the 10/20 game a little more if the lineup was right. When I got there it was full, so I checked around and found a really nice 2/5 game. Four really loose players at the table, chips flying everywhere, great game. Unfortunately it was also full. I ended up at a really good 1/2 game while waiting on seats at one of the other two tables to open up and just broke even for about an hour. I eventually got a call to the 2/5 game and jumped quickly to take my seat.

Now at this point I should mention a habit that I inherited from one of the people I met through poker. When I first got started in poker and read a few books about the game a lot of them discussed how to label and classify players. I don’t remember the specific details from those books other than Hellmuth’s thoughts on calling people tiger’s or some other type of animal. I find that funny because after watching him play over the last couple years I’m pretty sure he has two classes of players, the greatest ever which is a class reserved for himself and idiots, which is how he classifies pretty much everyone else. Anyway after a while you do learn to classify players to help make reads easier. However thanks to my friend (who shall remain nameless), I’ve started taking this to a whole new level. My friend likes to entertain the table when he plays by giving everyone horrible nicknames based on how they talk, look, or act. Most people take it pretty well and it makes for a fun game. What I’ve ended up doing to entertain myself during slow games it take these classifications and nicknames to something that probably shouldn’t be repeated in front of others at the table. It helps me remember hands with them when I can recall that last time I played a pot with the Shiva the Destroyer he called pot sized bets on a paired board with a flush.

So back to the game… the first big hand I played I made a good read and the wrong play all at once. About an hour into the session there was an 8 player pot where on the flop I faced a bet and a raise while I was holding the nut flush draw on a fairly uncoordinated board. The raise in front of me was for 5/6ths of what I had in play with in front of me, so it was an all in or fold decision. My initial thought was to fold because Kansas (the player just to my right) seemed to be making a similar decision to mine, which made me think that a couple of my outs were gone. After Kansas folded I instead decided to commit my stack because Lil Mr. Piggy (the player who raised) doesn’t play many pots and it was a good chance to get chips off him. I know he has a made hand because he is a nut peddler, but that meant it wasn’t going to improve much either so if I hit my draw I was likely good. The player who opened betting I haven’t given a nickname to yet, but he came along and we had a 3 way all in. I ended up making two pair and missing my flush draw and lost to Lil Mr. Piggy’s set. When I talked about the hand afterwords with Kansas I should have stuck with my gut feeling because he did fold a smaller flush draw. Right read, wrong play…. and one buy in down.

A little later in the session I had another pot with the villain from this hand who I like to call Shamwow. I call him that because he reminds me of Vince, the guy who does the Shamwow infomercials. Always has a cheesy grin, tries to talk to you constantly when You don’t really wanna listen, and from what I can tell he always leaves the game beat up. He was the reason I wanted to play in the 2/5 game. Though it’s not mentioned on the thread, he was firing away at me in the pot with KcJc and I rivered a 9 making a set to lock the hand up.

This time I had JJ in the small blind and he raised to 50 after a couple limpers and got one caller on the button. Remembering back to this thread I decided to play my hand stronger preflop this time and try to isolate him with what I thought was the best hand. I raised to 200, he called for the rest of his stack (another 90 or so) and I got the button to lay down his hand. So wrong play this time since he had KK. Funny thing about loose players is they wake up with hands too, he also wasn’t drinking as much as he was the night we last played. On the bright side the flop was T97 giving me a straight draw and a few more outs, king on the turn (taking away 2 outs) and an 8 on the river giving me a J high straight. Hooray for getting lucky once in a while. Unfortunately that was the largest pot I was going to win the rest of the night.

A little later I raised with KK to 35 and got 5 callers, and after betting out 120 on a 982 rainbow board I had to lay my hand down when the Lil Mr. Piggy check raised me 300 more. Worst part was while I was about 15 seconds into my decision a guy I like to call the old Richard Simmons called the clock on me. Richard Simmons is one of the most annoying players I’ve ever played with. He is a retired guy who wears silly colored warm up suits that look like something out of a sweating to the oldies video, that happen to be decorated with poker cards on them to the cardroom and every time he wins a pot he exclaims “SHIP IT!” like a complete and utter douchebag. So while I was debating if Piggy could be overplaying QQ/JJ here, I was also annoyed at Dick (hey, it’s short for Richard, another reason the nickname fits) calling the clock on me. After I decided to fold I waited out the entire clock just to piss the him off more. I think he was just pissed that I busted him out of the tournament the week before. We had a little spat after I commented about how he wasn’t going to get action over betting the pot unless he was beat. This came after he complained about no one calling 2k raises when the blinds are 50/100. I’m happy knowing he is one of the worst players in the room and he gives away more money than I make in a year.

I lost my second buy in of the night to a fellow FCP’er (he doesn’t have a nickname from me yet) when he called my button raise with T7 and I had AK. On a Q77 flop we got it all in (I had the nut flush draw again) and was hoping I could get him to lay down a Q since he knows I’m a fairly tight player. Bad read on my part. I missed my draw again, he ended up making 7’s full of Q’s and I left with my second worst losing night ever of live poker. I lost the same amount once in a 1/2 game where I went through 8 buy in’s. That sounds bad but of those 8 buy-ins I only got all my chips in the pot behind once, I just couldn’t get a hand to hold up. This time I was just making fast decisions and not really following my guy instinct. The two huge pots I lost I got in as a 21.34% favorite and 25.35% favorite. So I’ve been evaluating that session for the last two days looking for ways I could have played hands differently to control the pot or follow my instincts better. I think if I would have played my best poker I still would have had a losing session, I just wouldn’t have lost nearly as much.

So for now it’s going to be back to grinding at 1/2 since I hurt my bankroll a little too much to sit in the 2/5 game comfortably. My goal is now to be back up to where I can take shots at that game by the second week of May.