Hope Springs Nocturnal

It's 4 o'clock in the morning, and the buildup of glue on your chair is roughly equivalent to the buildup of chips that were formerly yours in your opponents' stacks. Under the gun, you limp in with the A◆ 2♥, which you know isn't a good idea, but you're stuck and antsy, and hoping the pot won't get raised. Those hopes are dashed when the rock in the cutoff seat makes it two bets to go, losing both the button and small blind. The big blind calls and so do you, hoping the raiser's not on ace-picture, but a big pocket pair he'll have to lay down when an ace hits the board and you turn up the heat. Alas, the script doesn't go according to plan, for when the flop comes A♣ 9♣ 7♠ and you bet out to find out where you are, your location turns out to be the other end of the rock's second raise.

The blind folds and you call, hoping that your opponent's on a flush draw. Yeah, that's the ticket, there are two clubs on board; he's probably on a draw, but if not … well, nothing says you can't hope for a deuce and root against clubs at the same time, right? Unfortunately for you, the turn pairs the 9, which means that if it's the ace you're up against, you're now drawing thinner than a model on the Atkins diet, and for a mere chop, at that – assuming an ace or 9 hits the river, or a king, in which case you'd better hope the rock's not on big slick. As for the flush draw, it's looking less and less likely, as the rock eschews the free card and fires once again. The only thing left to hope for now, as you make your crying call, is that magic ace, 9, or king; oh, and one more thing, Santa, the king can't be a club.

The river brings the 8♣, and you check, hoping that if you reach for your chips, maybe you can freeze your opponent, but your opponent's looking all toasty and warm as he fires in his final bet. You certainly can't fold now, not after coming this far, and as you reach for your chips, you find yourself hoping … well, let's see, do you even have a specific hope anymore, or is it now a more or less general thing, sort of like rooting for world peace? Might your opponent have misread his cards? Could he be playing entirely out of character? Hmm, what could this player raise with out of the gate and continue to push that doesn't beat your hand? And that's when it hits you that the thing he could be betting on that you can beat is the one thing you've been displaying this entire hand – weakness!

Isn't poker a wonderful game? The hope never dies!

It's easy, of course, to poke fun at someone for playing a hand so weakly, but I hate to make fun of friends, especially the one who played this hand, sheepishly explaining his "thinking" later on. Like many poker lapses, it was one more variation of getting so caught up in the moment that the moment becomes more important than the money. Unfortunately, getting married to this hand was only one of many mistakes this night, the biggest of which was succumbing to a marathon session in a game that wasn't very good, one in which his table image was in tatters, and whose lineup, to put it bluntly, made him a dog to begin with. Considering the two juicy games available nearby, it was an especially poor choice. But, as my friend explained, it was the wee hours of the morning, and the title of this column notwithstanding, his choice was less a matter of "hope" than simple inertia – a classic case of chair glue.

The good news is that my friend is not the type to make this mistake very often; the bad news is that it can take only one such session to cancel out a week or month's worth of good, winning play. For players susceptible to the most extreme seizures of "glue tilt" – those obsessive souls who finally get spit out of the poker game, only to be seduced by the nearest ATM and craps table – the results can be much, much worse. A lost weekend like that can put you on the edge of your stake, or out of action altogether. As for the more disciplined player, "glue-tilting" may be the rarest mistake he makes, but it's certain to be the most costly.

It's no surprise that chair glue and tilt so often go hand in hand, since bad decisions invariably lead to others. One of the most essential steps in avoiding this two-headed monster is to be honest with yourself about the state of your bankroll, making sure it's sufficient for the stakes you're playing. That's a reality check that's not always easy – especially these days. Let's face it, in a burgeoning poker culture in which movie stars suddenly want to cozy up to poker celebrities the way poker stars used to want to rub elbows with them, and magazines feature an ever-increasing array of younggun success stories, it's easy for an attendant "Why not me?" attitude to lodge itself in the brain, making the humbling idea of stepping down in limit, or taking a temporary break to build up a bankroll, a tougher pill to swallow than ever before.

But if success in poker requires anything, it requires seeing things the way they are, rather than the way you'd like them to be. When your bankroll's sufficient for the stakes you're playing, the hit it may take from a bad session is no particular cause for alarm; you can shake it off, get a good night's sleep, and go back and get 'em tomorrow. When you're short-rolled, on the other hand, what should be an acceptable loss represents such a large percentage of your stake that it can become magnified to the point of panic, and the ingredients for a sticky adhesive may start coagulating on your chair – ingredients like stubbornness, pride, desperation, fear, loss of nerve, loss of perspective, loss of judgment, and, finally, the mind-numbing loss of caring about anything at all, at which point all you want is to be put out of your misery, an assignment for which there's never any shortage of eager volunteers.

It takes heart and courage to take a shot at a big game, and there's certainly nothing wrong with doing so if you're gainfully employed, or have a source of income that will get you back in action in the event you go broke. But going broke in a calculated fashion in a game that offers the possibility of large reward is entirely different from blowing your bankroll in a marathon loss of self-control. Seeing things the way they really are is a poker essential that also takes heart, albeit of a less celebrated kind. If you want to avoid chair glue, make sure your bankroll passes muster for the limits you want to play, lest your judgment be so clouded by losing that you're not able to accept the loss or push yourself away from a bad game in which you're playing poorly – at which point you might as well be sniffing the glue as sitting in it. ♠