Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Poker as life

I have heard many sports compared to life. Football, chess, but none of them come as close as poker does. Playing poker seriously, as opposed to recreation or fun play, is a seriously hard business. You have to study strategy, keep up to date with the trends in the game. Have the courage of a lion, and the temperament of a zen master. There is a concept called Fundamental Theory of Poker, which basically says, you must minimize your mistakes versus maximising the errors of your opponents. Even if you put the hours of study in, and have a good understanding of the many concepts there are, poker will still test you. Test you in ways, that will make you question your objective existence. Things will happen, you will not believe. All that is because of luck, otherwise known as probability, variance, dancing with the poker gods and "OMG, I cannot believe he hit that river card".

The great poker commentator and author Jesse May once said mastering poker is about how you deal with luck. Because you can do everything right and still get punished. Punished again and again, and while you are getting punished, the poker gods will interupt your punishment and find ways to punish you a little bit more. So why play?

It can take many thousands or tens of thousands of hands to overcome variance. It's when you do, that the profit rolls in. Bad players make bad mistakes and they pay you off hand after hand. Sometimes it's harder to notice when this is happening as this is how things SHOULD play out.

I played 15, 367 hands of poker in April, not including tournaments, I am talking cash game hands only. Not a big number of hands by any means, some grinders notch up hundreds of thousands or even millions hands per month.


For a loss of 5.16 big blinds per 100. I checked through my hands and made a few errors, but nothing too bad. I am also running above above expected value, which is slightly worrying as I was luckier than the maths expected. I have been playing for about fifteen years, and should have progressed to higher stakes, but it just has never happened (yet). Who knows? keep plugging away.

This hand was a highlight from a session I have just finished


Always nice as the odds of making one are huge. 


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