The month of May is coming to a close and, with it, my ability to play poker in any serious fashion for a while. I have a manuscript due at my publishers on June 30th, and I am way, way behind on meeting the deadline. Ergo, YIPES is going on ice for thirty days while I attempt to kick out this 100,000 word + 400 image monster. I will still play a little poker here and there on FTP to “de-stress” occasionally, but the YIPES experiment requires a much more serious commitment to make the results valid. I just can’t justify the 1.5+ hours a day it needs to be successful-- or fail, for that matter. I’d rather the experiment crashed and burned with me playing seriously, then fail due to neglect. Better to burn out than fade away, go down swinging, and all that rot, I suppose. In any case, the month of June—as far as YIPES is concerned---will have never occurred. In a strict sense, this means that after today I am not allowed to play ANY poker on the Poker Stars site until July 1….
…which is probably just as well, seeing that I had a major meltdown this past week on PS, losing more than $13, or roughly 20% of my bankroll. Can you say, “OUCH!” The major bloodletting came in the form of a stab at a $5+.50 SnG that I was not, frankly, mentally prepared to play. For some boneheaded reason, I just jumped into the game on Friday afternoon without hardly any thought. I also was working on my book at the same time, listening to an NPR netcast on my headphones, and generally not paying full attention to the game. I called big raises with hands like KQo and 55. I also bluffed hard against loosey-goosey players and basically ended up donking off all my chips in truly amateurish fashion.
The remainder of the bloodshed came from some experimentation at the 10/20-cent limits, some higher stakes stud games, and a few ill-prepared and unfocused sessions of $1 SnGs. Like anyone, I don’t like losing that much money, but it is particularly galling when the fault isn’t with bad beats, but rather my own incredibly poor play. I’m a better player than that, and I really detest it when I don’t play up to my potential. As the guru likes to say, losing is never fun, but it always feels better to lose due to a bad beat than to bad play.
Oh well, what’s done is done, and I suppose I should be happy that I’m ending the month about ten dollars above the $40 YIPES target number for May. It will also be good to take a breather and play a little bit over on FTP, which I’ve been largely ignoring. Hell, just getting away from that AWFUL user interface on PS will be like taking a mini-vacation. Ugh.
The only other poker news to report is that I learned four new table terms this week that I had never heard of before. The first three were courtesy of the Game Shown Network online broadcasts of High Stakes Poker, which I’ve also been watching occasionally while playing my lunch-time game (yes, this is indeed another source of distraction and yet another reason I haven’t been playing my A-game; but I digress…). Anyway, the poker terms I found interesting were:
“Going South” - During one cash game on High Stake Poker, Freddy Deeb left the table for a smoke break. When he was gone, one of the other players jokingly remarked that “Freddy was going south.” The commentators explained that this phrase was slang for a player taking money off the table of a NL cash game. Apparently it is considered a serious breach of poker etiquette to take some of your money away from the game, and when Deeb came back to the game and learned that the others had accused him of it, he went ballistic, stopping the game and calling the floor man over to register his outrage at being slandered so heinously. This is a weird one that I honestly don’t quite get. I mean, it’s perfectly acceptable to get up and walk away with all of your winnings, but apparently you can’t pocket some of the cash during the course of play. Odd.
“Insurance” - In another episode, Phil Helmuth sat down at the table to play and, frankly, got eaten alive by the other players in the game. He started steaming, and the other sharks at the table wasted no time feasting on his stack. As a result, Phil’s fuse was lit and his play deteriorated, but the real interesting thing to note is that he apparently recognized his tilt state, and tried to limit the bloodletting by becoming more conservative in his play (which, unfortunately, is a sure-fire way to disaster when playing against pros). Anyway, at one point he picked up trip fives on the flop against Barry Greenstein, who had two pair, and got all his money in on the flop. Phil, having just suffered a big loss in the previous hand, asked Barry if he would give him “insurance” on this hand, which Barry quickly agreed to. Phil was a big favorite in the hand, but because he took insurance, the hand was basically over. I’m not clear how they calculated the numbers, but it was somehow a function of how much Phil’s hand was a mathematical favorite over Barry’s. I think the probability numbers were 9:1, and as a result, Barry was guaranteed 20% of the pot no matter what the turn and river cards were. In a sense, they made a deal for the pot before showing their cards and flipping over the turn and river. Weird.
“Run it Twice”- Often in the big game, when players got all their money in on the flop, one of them would propose that they “run it twice.” In other words, the dealer put out 4th and 5th street and a winner was declared. Half the pot was then allocated to that winner. Then the dealer moved those two turn and river cards aside and dealt out two more cards. The winner of that second board got the remaining half pot. It’s in the same category as Helmuth’s insurance request in that it helps to possibly minimize a big loss when a player gets a lot of money all in with something like a big pair against a draw and is nervous about the stakes at play. Understandable, but still kinda weird.
Finally, the last interesting term I learned is a “Doyle” hand, which is apparently a hand that someone plays after winning a big pot; i.e., the player raises regardless of his own two cards, simply because he’s on a rush after winning big. I’ve actually caught myself occasionally doing this, and I’ve seen other players do it also at the tables. It’s probably a variant of Success Syndrome, which itself is a form of Tilt. It’s understandable that losing can cause tilt, but less so that winning can also. In fact, as I write this, I think this is pretty much exactly what happened to me this week in YIPES. I got way out ahead of the curve in the experiment, felt like I had some chips to gamble with-- and clearly went off both my game and my overall strategy for the experiment.
Weird stuff, this poker psychology.
All in for now…
-Bug
…which is probably just as well, seeing that I had a major meltdown this past week on PS, losing more than $13, or roughly 20% of my bankroll. Can you say, “OUCH!” The major bloodletting came in the form of a stab at a $5+.50 SnG that I was not, frankly, mentally prepared to play. For some boneheaded reason, I just jumped into the game on Friday afternoon without hardly any thought. I also was working on my book at the same time, listening to an NPR netcast on my headphones, and generally not paying full attention to the game. I called big raises with hands like KQo and 55. I also bluffed hard against loosey-goosey players and basically ended up donking off all my chips in truly amateurish fashion.
The remainder of the bloodshed came from some experimentation at the 10/20-cent limits, some higher stakes stud games, and a few ill-prepared and unfocused sessions of $1 SnGs. Like anyone, I don’t like losing that much money, but it is particularly galling when the fault isn’t with bad beats, but rather my own incredibly poor play. I’m a better player than that, and I really detest it when I don’t play up to my potential. As the guru likes to say, losing is never fun, but it always feels better to lose due to a bad beat than to bad play.
Oh well, what’s done is done, and I suppose I should be happy that I’m ending the month about ten dollars above the $40 YIPES target number for May. It will also be good to take a breather and play a little bit over on FTP, which I’ve been largely ignoring. Hell, just getting away from that AWFUL user interface on PS will be like taking a mini-vacation. Ugh.
The only other poker news to report is that I learned four new table terms this week that I had never heard of before. The first three were courtesy of the Game Shown Network online broadcasts of High Stakes Poker, which I’ve also been watching occasionally while playing my lunch-time game (yes, this is indeed another source of distraction and yet another reason I haven’t been playing my A-game; but I digress…). Anyway, the poker terms I found interesting were:
“Going South” - During one cash game on High Stake Poker, Freddy Deeb left the table for a smoke break. When he was gone, one of the other players jokingly remarked that “Freddy was going south.” The commentators explained that this phrase was slang for a player taking money off the table of a NL cash game. Apparently it is considered a serious breach of poker etiquette to take some of your money away from the game, and when Deeb came back to the game and learned that the others had accused him of it, he went ballistic, stopping the game and calling the floor man over to register his outrage at being slandered so heinously. This is a weird one that I honestly don’t quite get. I mean, it’s perfectly acceptable to get up and walk away with all of your winnings, but apparently you can’t pocket some of the cash during the course of play. Odd.
“Insurance” - In another episode, Phil Helmuth sat down at the table to play and, frankly, got eaten alive by the other players in the game. He started steaming, and the other sharks at the table wasted no time feasting on his stack. As a result, Phil’s fuse was lit and his play deteriorated, but the real interesting thing to note is that he apparently recognized his tilt state, and tried to limit the bloodletting by becoming more conservative in his play (which, unfortunately, is a sure-fire way to disaster when playing against pros). Anyway, at one point he picked up trip fives on the flop against Barry Greenstein, who had two pair, and got all his money in on the flop. Phil, having just suffered a big loss in the previous hand, asked Barry if he would give him “insurance” on this hand, which Barry quickly agreed to. Phil was a big favorite in the hand, but because he took insurance, the hand was basically over. I’m not clear how they calculated the numbers, but it was somehow a function of how much Phil’s hand was a mathematical favorite over Barry’s. I think the probability numbers were 9:1, and as a result, Barry was guaranteed 20% of the pot no matter what the turn and river cards were. In a sense, they made a deal for the pot before showing their cards and flipping over the turn and river. Weird.
“Run it Twice”- Often in the big game, when players got all their money in on the flop, one of them would propose that they “run it twice.” In other words, the dealer put out 4th and 5th street and a winner was declared. Half the pot was then allocated to that winner. Then the dealer moved those two turn and river cards aside and dealt out two more cards. The winner of that second board got the remaining half pot. It’s in the same category as Helmuth’s insurance request in that it helps to possibly minimize a big loss when a player gets a lot of money all in with something like a big pair against a draw and is nervous about the stakes at play. Understandable, but still kinda weird.
Finally, the last interesting term I learned is a “Doyle” hand, which is apparently a hand that someone plays after winning a big pot; i.e., the player raises regardless of his own two cards, simply because he’s on a rush after winning big. I’ve actually caught myself occasionally doing this, and I’ve seen other players do it also at the tables. It’s probably a variant of Success Syndrome, which itself is a form of Tilt. It’s understandable that losing can cause tilt, but less so that winning can also. In fact, as I write this, I think this is pretty much exactly what happened to me this week in YIPES. I got way out ahead of the curve in the experiment, felt like I had some chips to gamble with-- and clearly went off both my game and my overall strategy for the experiment.
Weird stuff, this poker psychology.
All in for now…
-Bug
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