Queens or Better

The poker columnist Roy Cooke likes to tell the story of how a friend of his only plays “Queens or better” on his last lap if he’s in the black for a poker session. The friend’s rationale is that he wants to leave the game with a positive attitude and is willing to give up edge to achieve that. Roy said that on the surface this isn’t very smart poker; for instance, would you really muck Jacks on the button if it was folded to you on your last lap of a session? For most of us, the answer is no, but yes might be a better choice overall if it meant you were going to leave happy and come back to play poker next time with a positive winning attitude. Sometimes it makes sense to pass on a +EV situation if it means a bigger +EV Psychological Mindset.

So what does this have to do with me? Besides the “hey, I feel the same way; i.e., I hate getting dealt Anna on the last lap of a session I’m about to put in the win column,” you mean? Actually, it means a fair bit, but in an opposite sense. I need to start playing “Queens or better” not when I’m about to leave a game, but rather when I first sit down. Let me explain.

I’ve discovered a bit of a leak in my game recently. Seems that most times I sit down to play, I end up losing a disproportionate amount early on and then have to work hard to recover the money I just donked off. I think part of the problem is just getting my brain into the game. It’s almost as if I temporarily forget that poker is a game of skill and for some reason I expect luck to take over and win me some quick money early in a game. Weird. Yesterday morning’s session was a good example:

I thought I had time to play 200 hands, but Xmas duties intervened and I had to cut the session short at just 46 hands. The game was $.50/1.0 6max, which is (oddly) a game I haven’t played very much of lately. For some reason, I skipped directly from $.25/.50 to $1/2 without spending any serious quality time in the intermediate game between the two limits. But I digress….

Anyway, I sat down at the table and on my second hand of the session I picked up A5o in the SB. There was a limp in the cutoff, I completed, and the BB knuckled the check. This of course was my first mistake, as I had no business playing a small ace out of position and against opps that I had zero reads on. Guaranteed if I was playing my A-game, I would have folded the A5 without two seconds thought in this same situation. I mean, come on. What was I hoping would flop? If an ace flopped and I got resistance, would it mean the opp had a bigger ace? Or was he/she just a calling station with middle or bottom pair? Or slow playing a monster? The problem is I had zero reads and was first to act on all the streets. Not good.

You know what happened next, right? The dreaded ace hit on the flop and all I could think was, “hey, the cutoff would have raised preflop with a big ace, right?” So I led out, got the BB to fold, but the cutoff just smoothed. Quickly. Sigh…. If I’d been paying attention better, I would have slowed way down at this point, but all I could see was my ace paired with the board.

To make matters worse, the turn actually semi-improved my hand to give me the idiot end of an open-ended straight draw. This was my kiss of death on the hand, as I now had just enough outs to continue. I led on the turn and got raised. Finally, FINALLY, I slowed down and thought about what the opp might have, but by then I was getting the right odds to call again.

You know how this ended, right? River was a blank. I checked. The opp bet. I called. He turned over ATo and won the hand with a better kicker than mine.

A few hands later, I donked off another big part of my stack with KJo in the hijack seat. The same opp as before called my open raise from the BB, and I didn’t stop to think why he’d do that. Flop was all rags, he checked, I c-bet, and he quickly called. Note the “quickly” part again? Turn and river were blanks, but I kept firing into the pot and he kept quickly calling. I was drawing pretty dead from early in the hand and I should have noticed it.

Fortunately, I was able to kick myself in the butt and start playing decent poker after that, but by then I was $11.50 in the hole and had a long way to go just back to break even (see chart, above). By hand 37 I was back to zero and then posted a small profit when I finally had to quit at hand 46.

The lesson to all this is I would have probably made an addition $7 or $8 above my meager $3 profit for the session if I’d been able to get off just those two losing hands. Playing too friskily early in a session is a definite leak in my game that needs plugging. Sometimes I can post a quick hit-and-run profit playing this way, but PT3 stats show me that in the long run it’s a net –EV play. I’ve really, really got to slow down early in a game and build some reads on the opp before getting out of line with hands like A5o or KJo. Maybe my new mantra prior to play should be “Queens or better.”

Hmmm. On second thought, perhaps we should change that to “Jacks or better,” because come on, who’s gonna fold Jacks on the button when it’s folded around? :-)

All-in for now…
-Bug