Playing the “right” cards does not always mean you will win at Poker!

Posted by The Marksman at 31 March, at 06 : 09 AM Print

It has happened to us all, you are dealt a big hand and end up losing with AKs to players who will call your pre-flop raise because they “just had a feeling” about their 58 off-suit.  You get knocked out and start to wonder where it all went wrong.

If you are anything like me, you let those bad beats and hands affect you into your next poker session. You are so angry that he drew to his 2 outer and caught it on the river!  What happened?  You played the right hand, made the correct bets, but still lost.

That this is how I used to think for a very long time, it took me a while to change my approach to the game. I used to think that I deserved to win because I did not play bad hands, but my opponents did. I believed that in the long run all I had to do was play good hands and I would be a winner.

What I eventually discovered is poker is so much more than this.  Anyone who has a regular poker game knows one or two people who get angry every night they lose.  These people just KNOW that they are better than their opponents.  You will run into this player very often, and in most cases, they are very easy to read, and very easy to aggravate.

If you fear your approach to the game may be this way, my advice would be to start focusing on your own approach to the game.  Get away from focusing on the mistakes of your opponents. No matter how good you are, everyone is prone to an obvious bad play.

Most of the more experienced will probably even know that it is a bad play, but will do it anyway to take a risk. Some of the more common excuses include things like “I was already pot committed” or “I thought he had me beat, but it was just too good to lie down.” I have never met a player who was not prone to these misconceptions from time to time. I will give you an example.

I was dealt pocket Aces in early position, I knew I had several aggressive players at the table with me.  So in order to eliminate any speculators I raised 5x the big blind, and I was going to be happy to take the blinds and call it a day.

Well I got one caller, and I am thinking f*cking great what does this person have that warrants a call this early in the tournament.  I declared to the entire table that I had pocket aces, and yet still I get a caller WTH!?!?

Well the flop comes out there and I feel I am still in the lead, but there is a flush draw possibility out there, so I lead out strong and the person goes all in!  I call mostly out of frustration and being pissed off, and sure enough they had a club flush draw with Q 10.

I am thinking “are you kidding me?”  You lay that down pre flop to a big raise early in a tournament, what were they thinking calling that raise?!?!  Of course the last club hits on the river and I am knocked out of the tournament.  They start celebrating and all, I was pissed, it was the first time I actually wanted to talk sh*t at the poker table.

I left quietly pissed off, and wondering what I did wrong.  So what is the moral of the story?  Well I stewed over it for a long time, and somehow convinced myself that the player was horrible and I did nothing wrong.  But, this is a losing player’s mentality to only look at it from one perspective.

It took me a long time to see that I could have handled the situation differently.  I came to the conclusion that I should have cut my losses early, and lived to fight another day.  Then I was reminded by a friend that you can’t win a tournament at the beginning, but you sure can lose one.

I should have raise a little more than the standard raise, and controlled the pot as much as I could to not induce an all-in play.  If the person went all-in I could just fold and would not have had so many chips invested in the pot, the loss would have been minimized.

I guess the real moral of the story would be that I knew what cards to play, I played them, and I played them badly. Knowing what cards to play seems very small in comparison to knowing HOW to play the cards in this instance, and many others. I definitely shouldn’t have played the hand that far.

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