Evaluating Your Play: Part III

It is very easy to lose touch with the reality of how you are playing. We all remember unlucky hands and the times when our opponents drew out. It is very common for a weaker hand to be ahead at some point, but eventually lose. For example, A-3 may be briefly ahead on a flop of 8-7-3, only to lose later to an A-T that makes a pair or even a straight. Several of us recently went to the movies at the Orleans. Afterwards we stopped at the poker room to pick up someone who had been recently knocked out of the Friday tournament. I noticed the bright blond hair of an old friend who had been reduced to playing $2-$4 limit hold’em. She is an intelligent woman with enough graduate credits to have gotten multiple PhDs. Unfortunately she isn’t a very good gambler, and has gone through most of a large divorce settlement and maxed out all of her credit cards playing limit hold’em, both live and online. Many of her friends, and her ex-husband, are knowledgeable players. They have all told her that she is much too loose, but instead of learning or tightening up, she just argues. If both your results and your friends tell you that you are doing something wrong, you probably are.

I went over to say hello, and she immediately stated she’d been playing since 8:00 am. By know it was close to 10:00 pm, so she had been playing fourteen hours. Even the best, most disciplined players don’t always play well after fourteen hours. She said that she had been playing really well, but was unlucky. Limit $2-$4 is a very hard game to beat. Not because the players are good, but because the combination of rake, jackpot drop, and tipping are huge compared to the small stake of the game. These games can be beaten by extremely tight play. The fact that most games are 9 or 10-handed also dictates extremely tight play. I watched four consecutive hands. Let’s look at her preflop play on all these hands:

She started under-the-gun (UTG) plus one, called with Q-8 offsuit, called a raise.

Next under the gun, she called K-9 offsuit, and called a raise.

Now in the big blind, she picked up A-T offsuit. The pot was raised and she reraised.
Now in the small blind, she called a double raise with K-2 offsuit.

She had either called or raised on four hands out of four. All of them should have been easy folds. She had the following results on these hands:

She missed the flop and folded.

She flopped a 9-7-3 and won a big pot when her K-9 held up, although she was all-in before the river.

She flopped two pair and won another big pot from someone with A-K or A-Q.

She flopped a full house — K-K-2. Got callers on the flop. The turn was a Q, and the pot was capped. The river a jack. There was a bet, she raised, and then called a reraise. Her opponent had started with K-Q and made a better full house on the turn.

She turned to me, and complained about how unlucky she was. I had watched four hands. She never had the best hand preflop, but was always involved. On the second and third hands, she drew out on better hands, and won big pots. On hand four, she took the lead on the flop, but was then dead, and managed to lose at least two unnecessary big bets by raising when it looked like she was already beaten. Yes, she was unlucky to flop a boat and lose, but that’s part of poker, and she was only ahead on one street out of four. When you start with the worst hand, then pull ahead, your opponents often outdraw you. Especially in low-limit poker where players tend to take off a card if they have any chance to win a big pot.

Another mistake she was making was that she was also looking at her two starting cards as soon as they were dealt. I usually advise against doing this, since you may telegraph your intentions to your opponents. In her case, it didn’t matter as much, since she nearly always called.

Normally I’d say four hands is not a statistically significant sample, but I had no doubt how badly she was playing. Here is an intelligent woman, for whom the money is at least somewhat significant. Aside from looking at her cards before it was her turn to act, her preflop play has been unbelievable bad, way too loose. Her postflop play was mediocre, a little too aggressive, too much focus on her hand and not on what they had. It is hard to play effectively for a long session. It is even harder to do so when you are losing. Yet, she had continued her losing session for over twelve hours without realizing that she wasn’t playing well. She felt she was playing well, and getting unlucky. I guess in a way she was right. She knows what hands to play in each position, but was unlucky not to be disciplined enough to wait for them. She was unlucky not to realize how badly she was playing. She was unlucky to be completely incapable of evaluating her play, even after years of bad results and good advice from all her friends. ♠

Steve “Zee” Zolotow, aka The Bald Eagle, is a successful games player. He currently devotes most of his time to poker. When escaping from poker, he hangs out in his bars on Avenue A — Nice Guy Eddie’s at Houston and Doc Holliday’s at 9th Street — in New York City.