Running as Root

Gambling Problem?

I was just idly wondering about how much poker I play. I play online while watching television (a bad thing to do) most evenings and I play at multiple tables. Last month I played in 202 sit-and-gos. These are 10 person tournaments that if played to completion, meaning I get 1st or 2nd, last about an hour and a half. My average finish last month was a dismal 5th (I usually do better, etc). Assuming that 5th will take you roughly 45 minutes to get, that means I played around 150 table hours of poker. Hands, on average, take about a minute apiece. This time gets shorter the deeper in you go but it'll work for my calculations. That means for each 5th place finish I see about 45 hands or roughly 9,000 hands last month. My flops seen percentage is conservatively around 15 percent. So, I probably saw 1,350 flops last month. As the title says, that's a lot of poker. Again, there is some wild ass guessing in there, but I think it's probably a fairly accurate number.

Now, do I have a problem? I, of course, say no as it's an entertaining hobby for me. I lost a whopping 65 units of some type of currency last month with all that hot poker action. Some months I win, some I lose, but for the most part I think I've been treading water or trending slightly upward over the past 2 years. The extent of my gambling problem is that I can't get donks to lay down their inside straight draws to pot size bets despite the fact they're 10 to 1 to hit it. I mean, I lost to a 1 outter inside straight flush last month to finish 1 out of the money (I already had my flush). Okay, no one wants to hear or read a bad beat story.

Oh, and my other problem is that internet poker is considered gambling while the state lottery isn't. Poker isn't even in the same category as blackjack, roulette, keno, or the fucking lottery. It is a game of short term luck and long term skill where correct play is more likely to be rewarded over the long haul. The more you play any of those other games (with the exception counting cards in blackjack) the more likely you are to lose.

The Future of Poker

Poker is about making the correct decision more often than the people you're playing. It's also about making your opponent make incorrect decisions or do things they would never do if they could see all of the cards. If you just do that, all of those bad beats (statistical anomalies) will even out. You do this by knowing the odds, knowing people, and knowing a little psychology.

You can read about the odds (The Theory of Poker is muy badass for this), but the people part of the game (which is huge in no limit) has to be learned by playing. If you go to a brick and mortar casino you'll be lucky to see a quarter of the hands an internet player will see in an equal amount of time. Sure, you get to study your opponent's physical mannerisms and ticks (and learn to hide your own), but in my opinion serious players soon begin to hide those fairly well and even start throwing off a lot of false signals. Once they do this, you need to rely less on which way they lean in their chair when they make a bet, how confident they seem, etc. You need to start paying attention to their betting pattern. Incidentally, Caro's Book of Poker Tells is a good start on picking up tells.

If the flop puts up a pair and your opponent bets a lot into you, you have to know that if he's inexperienced it usually means he's bluffing and you may be able to go over the top of him and take the pot right there. However, if he's more experienced he knows that you know that so he bets into you anyway, hoping you'll make the hyper-aggressive re-raise. You also have to learn to identify the maniac or the rock by their betting patterns. Their play 20 hands ago may be a good indicator of what they're holding now.

The way to learn this is to play hands. A lot of hands. Which you can do with zero travel time, virtually no waiting list, a smaller rake, with a higher volume of hands, and from the comfort of your own home on the internet. And that's why the so-called "internet players" have been doing unbelievably good in real life tournaments despite the fact that they're so much younger and supposedly less experienced than the older guys.

To sum up, 1) I play a lot of poker and 2) poker is like sex in that it should be done at home with the assistance of the internet, sometimes in large groups, and occasionally in public. Oh and some people make a lot of money at it.

Disclaimer: I only play poker on the internet for "play money" for entertainment purposes because gambling is wrong (except the lottery). And since this post has the word "poker" in it a bazillion times I should have just titled it "Spam-a-lama-ding-dong."

This entry was posted on Monday, June 5th, 2006 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Entertainment, Poker. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.