Time for a change

Right, there is no point in my poker blog if I’m going to be anything but completely honest. I want to be frank with the readers and myself, and say this: my preparation and my attitude to the game has got to improve.

 The real for this fire has been the last couple of days, but it’s something that I’ve been thinking about for a while now. This weekend I made my way down to Rendezvous casino in Brighton for a £500 Freezeout, an event with a good field and an unbelievably good structure. Therefore, I was really disappointed to be knocked out with 17 players left at 4pm on Sunday. The circumstanes are incidental; I have had crap luck recently, but it does not matter. If that is going to be the case, I need to work harder to do two things: to make sure that I get enough chips together whilst the structure is good, and, most importantly, to ensure that on the day where the the luck is on my side, I am in the right frame of mind to capatalise on it.

My real frustration is that, before my long journey on Saturday, I met a friend in Birmingham on Friday night. I did the usual thing: we went to the Arcadian bars, decided to go to Gatecrasher, and then for a few more at the Tap and Spile. It added up to quite a few drinks, and a pretty late night. That is fine the normal person, who works hard during the week, but I need to realise my weekend (or whenever the live poker tournament happens to be) is my day of work.

And hard work it is going to be. It is easy to play decent poker without putting in too much mental effort. What is tough is to be in the great frame of mind needed to pick up on the massive wealth of information avalibale at the table, and to play really great poker.  I did not play awfully down in Brighton; I just did not play well enough. I should have been in good shape to search for tells on my tough starting table, to make my decisions better, and then work hard afterwards to analyse my mistakes.

I’m going to start a new feature on the blog, called “my 50 worst mistakes.” This will fill up quickly, even if I achieve the better mental preparation I am looking for. For, even in a succesful poker tournament, you can pick up on any number of things that you could have done better. With big live tournaments in the diary for most weekends for the rest of the year, I’m going to bet that this section will fill up before 2009 hits us. I’d love to hear your thoughts on some of the hands.

This weekend’s tournament will provide the first few entries! There were no awful mistakes, but too many spots where I coudl have got a better value bet, pulled a good bluff, or made a better decision. Whilst this will always be the case to some extent, I am really frustrated to feelt that it may have been because of being in a pretty unfresh state at the table.

Poker is a game which makes laziness very possible. I’ve found that I can turn a good profit plaiyng cash games online, and that would make for a fairly lazy existence. I’ve combatted that by trying to do as many other things as I can, both in the game and aside from it. It’s also possible to have a pretty lazy attitude towards the live tournaments. You can play a pretty good game by making good, defualt decisions, and it doesn’t take too much concentration to work out which style your opponents are playing with. And anyway, however hard you try, the biggest factor in any poker event is going to be the one you cannot control- your own luck.

However, poker offers so much more than that. I’m going to set myself the challenge that from now on, ‘live’ poker will be really hard work for me. I want to put everything in place to make sure my preparation is good, and then use all my energy picking up every little clue I can at the table. After a eight hour day in ‘live’ poker, I want to feel exhausted.

I’ve also been thinking alot recently about what my future in the game may be. I never intended to play poker full time when I was coming to the end of university three years ago, nor even indeed to do what I do now- which is to base a living round it by writing in magazines, and to be lucky enough to play a lot in live tournaments. My parents have always had quite a few worries and moral objections about the game, and to be honest, I definitely agree with some of their worries. I’ll write more about this in future weeks, as I write about the kind of decisions I am making. I’ve been doing a bit of volunteer work- at the moment, nothing much more than to balance the cushy lifestyle poker offers- but I really hope I can get into this more.

I feel that my indecison has left me in a bit of  a state of ‘limbo,’ not knowing what I am going to be doing. This has maybe taken a sharp edge off my attitude to the game. Well, I said there was no point to a blog which was not completley honest, and so here we go:

Poker came about at a point where quite a bit changed in my life. My big passion had always been athetics, and long distance running. I did some kind of training every day, was in the athletics team at university, and ran a couple of marathons. Suddenly I found that the whole thing was leaving me completely exhausted, so much that I just couldn’t function at all. I’ve never found what it is; doctors have labelled it as CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome), but I’ve felt this is unfair to people I’ve met who really have CFS, whose whole life can be so tiring. That is not the case for me normally, but unfortunately is if I attempt any kind of exercise at all. I have been able to get round my problem, but have had to give up doing exercise- what had been my one big hobby, and defined my positive outlook to life.

As a result, I think I’ve kicked my heels a little, and have sometimes felt like “what’s the point of trying hard at something?” This way maybe inevitable, but is immature of course. And so what is the big decision? From this point, all of that frustarted energy is going to go into the new passion- poker.