The Good Grind

I am now fully back into the comfortable zone of grinding. It is it what it is. You play your hands the way they should be played. If they hold up or your draw hits, you win, if they don’t, you shrug it off and move to the next one.

Running bad is hard on the common folk. Losing a thousands of dollars in a few months, weeks or days for a non gambling guy like me will affect your outlook on tons of things. The game is not fun anymore, we fear playing it. We expect, even anticipate, over cards when we see a flop with pocket queens. We back away whenever we get raised on the turn. We play the game with a losing mentality and results end up taking over making solid decisions.

I’ve been through two major downswings in 2006 already and I’m still digging my way out of the second one (Almost out). Did I really learn anything throughout these hard times? I think so. After going through a whole month of losing with the best three starting hands in Hold’em and suffering all those beats that you hear/read about over and over again, I now realize that the biggest culprit in all of this was my own play. Playing in that weak-scared mode to protect my investments further magnified the problems. The pots that I won were smaller than what they should have been, since I backed away from putting more money into pots in fear of another loss, and I ended up losing pots that aggressiveness might have won me outright. Easy to see how you can get yourself stuck into a pretty nasty hole that way. Never again.

I played the WWDN again last night. Lost most of my stack on a semi-bluff all-in where my 12 outs didn’t hit. Winning that huge pot would have launched me towards the final table. Maybe next time?

Thing is, I don’t really know if I’m gonna play this tournament anymore. The people are cool and all but the stakes are becoming a bit low for my levels. I’m hardly focussed whenever I’m playing it since I’m multi-tabling cash games and pulling in pots that are bigger than what first place in that tournament pays. We’ll see how it goes I guess...

Just to prove how much of a self-contradicting moron I am, I will play the Mookie tonight since I have nothing else to do. I also think that today might be the last day of the NHL season so I might check that out for a bit, but I should definitely be ready for the Mook.