Fishy play

Why do I post about forgiving myself for mistakes then lie awake replaying the hands in my head and getting more and more steamed at my poor play?! I may have to change my blog title to “Confessions of a Donkey”. Dropped $45 last night at Inter and most of it came during my 10 minute spell at a cash table just before bed.A combination of “last hand syndrome”,lack of focus and a wrong assumption.

Before I rip into last nights dreadful plays I’m going write about what I see as my greatest attribute at the table and possibly the reason I was a damn fine salesman for ten years and that attribute is empathy.

From Wikipedia :“Empathy is one's ability to recognize and understand the emotion of another. As the states of mind, beliefs, and desires of others are intertwined with their emotions, one with empathy for another may often be able to more effectively divide another's modes of thought and mood. Empathy is often characterized as the ability to "put oneself into another's shoes", or experiencing the outlook or emotions of another being within oneself, a sort of emotional resonance”

I try and achieve a close emotional resonance with everyone at my table in order to try and work out what current psychological state they are operating in and how this will affect their play.As I read on another blog today ,poker is a game of people and people do not ( esp at my levels) simply play according to the Maths.

Letting egos and emotions affect play is probably a far more prevalent issue at the micro-stakes I play and possibly won’t be such a large factor at higher levels.In fact even from my limited experience at $200 nl I know this to be the case as someone trying a bluff and failing will usually fold far more quickly ( as if accepting that trying to bluff and fail is no big deal) whereas a micro-stakes player will delay their fold because they are annoyed at having their bluff snapped off and want the table to think they’ve at least represented some kind of hand.

In the 6 max hand I called a raise with 34 sooted from a player who had won 5/6 of the last hands played and who’d obviously been on a wee rush ,showing down AA and KK and taking another pot after the table folded to his continuation bet.The flop came A high and he bet out again,I felt I sensed weakness as his continuation bet was about ¼ of the pot so I raised him the size of the pot to put him to the test.I’d also been at the table for about ten minutes and had maybe limped twice and folded everything else so felt my reraise had a good chance of working.

He called and when the turn brought a second club he bet out enough to put me all in which felt strange to me as I was sure if he’d hit at all, it was on the flop and probably not the Ace judging by the size of his bet.( on a previous hand his continuation bet was pot sized).I had been intending on pushing all in myself if he’d checked the turn and at this point I should have folded….but I called ( for the rest of my stack) ,hoping to hit a club and win the pot on the river.Of course no club came and his k8 beat my 4 high!

I misjudged his mood badly,thinking that his previous bets meant he was a “good enough” player to fold a hand like KQ ( KQ or a mid pair were the post flop range I put him on) after hitting a K on an Ace high flop, when actually he was a bad enough player that he thought winning a few hands in a row meant he could win with any two.

The other two costly plays were in Sng’s where I relied on a tight image to try a large preflop bluff with the Hammer which ended up knocking me out ( called by A10) and another where I overplayed KQ postflop and was called down by 88.

For the first time in weeks there’s no football to watch tonight.Mark will be over for our usual Halo fest on the xbox,Mrs A is working and Step A will be up later now that she has finished with school until after the summer.

Thanks to Miasdad for the comment on getting a DADI team together but I'm going to leave the decision to play until tomorrow night and see how tired I feel first.

Ok thanks fo reading...