There is a famed pro poker player named Mike "the Mouth" Matusow. He's a good tournament player, and sometimes his play even borders on greatness. But he is most renown for his "blow-ups" and I'm not talking about the needling or berating he sometimes engages in.
Mike will be going along, firing on all cylinders, and someone will do something or make a move on him - and he will throw all judgement and reason right in the toilet with a colossally stupid move. Typically this will end with the vanishing of all his chips, and a subsequent bemoaning by him of bad luck and bad beats.
Such was my world last night. Except I made two colossally stupid moves.
I played well at first, but couldn't get a break or a steal to save my life. I got all in against a short stack and had A 10 to his A 9. Guess which card spiked on the river. I found myself at negative 10xBB early on, and had to push in middle position with K 10 suited when UTG min-raised me with a nothing flop. Something about the min-raise just irks me, and I was surprised to see it coming from wytrabbit. I chalked it up to a poorly timed probe bet, and brought my short but still threatening stack over the top to his donk move.
He turned over aces. (After a ridiculous pause, that was either an intentional slow-roll or a computer glitch.) Whoops. Guess I was the actual donk.
Naturally I sucked him out and berated him for the slow roll (which I shouldn't have done, but as I said - I was channeling Matusow).
My chip stack kept right on dwindling however, even as we moved to one table. I was still over 10xBB, so I was going to tighten up and wait for premium cards. The blinds rose and rose.
I sat on a very painful BB of 200 to my 1200 stack. I had Q3os (yuk), but I was prepared to defend if anyone wanted to get frisky. All folded to the button who min-raised. Have I mentioned I HATE min-raises?
Allow me to digress.
Pre-flop a min-raise encourages action, but too much action. Even pocket aces aren't a big favorite with more than 2 callers. Almost every knuckle head with Q3os or worse is getting the right price to suck out good starting cards. Post-flop, a min-raise is even worse. Again, it encourages everyone with ridiculously long-shot draws to stay and suck out the person with the current bad hand. Min-raises are stupid and bush league, except when the min-bet or raise happens to be a large percentage of the average stack. Then I can see it (and I have used it) as an effective weapon against mid to small sized stacks.
In this case, the button that min-raised me was a new guy that I had the pleasure of watching implode last week as we approached the money. Surely he was on that path now, trying to steal blinds from a short stack such as me. I had to stand up, and defend. I was not going to let this punk bitch donkey bully me.
All in sucker! Call me down!
He did. He had kings. I suck.
Stupid decision from top to bottom on my part. Because of my contempt for the inferior min-bet/raise I let my emotions guide my decision, and it was foolish beyond belief. Patience is probably the biggest virtue in poker, be it cash or tournament; and I seem to have lost it of late. With all the literature I've read about being aggressive, I tend to confuse simple flat out aggression with SELECTIVE aggression. Maybe someday I'll learn my lesson, and become capable of swallowing my pride and living to fight another day.
Harrington on Hold-em gives perhaps the best piece of underrated advice on tournament poker. Survival is paramount. I need to go back to basics in my game, recognize that I'm not exactly up against the most sophisticated bunch of players - and learn to lay down my junk in the face of a good position bet.
When I do that, I know I can avoid the min-raising donks and felt their sorry asses when I do catch actual cards.
I so can't wait for next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment