Poker: Are you in or are you out?

Are you the same as me? You’re either 100% committed, total captivated, and obsessive about poker, or you’re a bit meh.

Since my instinctive outburst last weekend (and although it probably sounded stupid and very whingy I had to tilt it out of my system because the alternative would have been doing on the tables) I haven’t played a single hand of poker. I want to avoid poker in its entirety for a day and was doing well until Nick (knightmare nick) phoned up and asked me what I was doing and I realised now might be a good time to do another podcast for RTR.

So we did a podcast (which, no doubt, you’ve ALL listened to) and then watched Nick play on some $3 18 manners on Pokerstars. Again, I was dumbfounded by the appalling play on display. Nick was doing some really horrible things like limping UTG or limping with AX after two callers and loads more crap. But the thing was that the table was letting him do these very weird plays so he was seeing lots of flops and capitalising when others made mistakes. I thought to myself, I could kill these tables. But I probably couldn’t and I don’t know how anyone else might either. Their so much limping, min betting and min raising, OR completely the opposite, over-aggressive stuff like raising 10X preflop, and shoving/shove reraising that there is no middle ground for a person with knowledge and experience to crave out their edge. It was essentially bingo. Good players can probably get down to the top eight or nine consistently, but to get into the money their probably going to have to race for all their chips and get lucky. Which is what Nick did twice to get a first and second for his challenge.

Perhaps I’m being a bit bitter about other people’s success but I’m not sure how you can really carve out a profit in poker these days, except for being comparable to other regulars with a healthy rakeback tucked into you expected value. Burnley Mik of the the RTR forums put on a post about this saying how can you beat the game with so many tutorial sites making the average player fairly good. Again, my rather sharp and bitter response was, “The answer is we've all missed the bus until the next poker boom - if it ever happens,” so I guess now might be a good time to expand on this.

Whatever percentage of luck and skill you think there is in poker the truth probably is that it’s not a lot. Maybe 80-90% luck and 10-20% skill with whatever’s left contributing to mental skill (bankroll management, ability to not tilt etc). I dunno, maybe some percentages are exacerbated for different people. The bottom line is that I think you’re left with a fairly small percentage that represents your edge. What’s a good win rate for a cash room player, 3 big blinds per 100 hands? What’s a good ROI for a sng or MTT player, 5-10%. Whatever it is, it’s slight. Then it’s eroded by the rake so you’re left with an even tinier percentage. AND NOW let’s factor in what Mik’s said about all the video sites making players better, the current online gambling vortex the US is in preventing the mainstream from really getting involved and five years of poker since the beginning of the poker boom and you’re left with a percentage that’s so insignificant that hardly seems worth playing at all.
Now, back to my original point – I’m sorry, most of the above was a complete detour from the first point I was trying to make. If you’ve noticed I’ve not mentioned anything about hand analysis, player strategies and so on and so on. That’s because, at the moment, I’m not into poker in the slightest. This always happens when I don’t play for a few days. I lose complete interest in loading up tables and even get nervous butterflies in my stomach when I start to think about playing again. Will I remember everything I’ve learned from the past three years of playing, what if I have another bad session, etc, etc etc?

Contrast this to two weeks ago when I couldn’t stop thinking about how to play hands, was constantly thinking about how long it would be until my next session, watching video upon video upon video from Deuces Cracked, spending hours setting up HUDs and day after day of actually playing poker and you can see I’m about to mirror my point from Nick’s $3 Pokerstars games: there is no middle ground.

I don’t know if you’re the same and I don’t know if it’s my personal makeup or the game of poker that’s just like this. All I know is that I’ve not played poker for a week and I have virtually no immediate desire to play it.

On a side note, I’ve been picked to play in a team event at RTR which should be good laugh. I was astonished to find myself not being picked last by team captain Cell 1919; especially considering my recent moaning and bad run of…. no, I won’t say luck… bad run of situations. I’m teamed up with APAT champ Mair (which can never be a bad thing) and Nick who, and I really hope he doesn’t read this, isn’t actually to bad a sit and go player. He’s a pretty one dimensional player but it a good way because he’s very aggressive at the right times and will always put his opponents to the test so he’s often in 50/50 or 60/40 or 45/55 spots but pretty much 100% of the time he’s the one putting the chips in so he’s always got that additional fold equity tangent coming into play.

My God, a whole paragraph praising Nick. I’ll never let it down!

You may have noticed that this blog is becoming more and more Raise the River-centric so make sure you pop on over to the site.

Hope you enjoy reading and thanks for the comments about my blunt honesty, even when I do sometimes sound silly. Despite all my protestations I’ve never lost any money playing the game and this will be my third successive year making a profit. Just need to add a couple of zeros to my limits which should, in turn, add a couple of zeros to my hit counter.

Anyway. Poker, are you currently in or out? There’s no dabbling, no occasional jaunts, no one for the weekend. You’re either obsessed or apathetic. I definitely fall into the latter category. For the time being. We all know what this games is like.