Reflections on 6 months of poker

I was thinking about it and decided I should check back to see when I first started playing “real money” poker. On Feb 23rd I wrote my first post. I lost $50 in 20 minutes playing $.10/.25. Since then I’ve been up and down. I’ve played in several different home games, casinos in Gary, IN, Atlantic City, NJ, Lac Du Flambeau, WI and Calgary, AB plus a few different card rooms in Bozeman, MT. I’ve run my FullTilt account down to practically zero about 3 times and back up again. OfficialPokerRankings.com has my ROI in tournaments positive, which means I must be a -EV player in cash games.

Also in that time I have:

• Read more than ten poker books.
• Seen Rounders (multiple times), Lucky You (yuck), the Grand and the Cincinnati Kid.  Not that they’re poker-related, just gambling-related, but I’ve re-watched all the Oceans movies also.
• Subjected my wife to hundreds of hours of Poker After Dark, High Stakes Poker and old WSOP and WPT coverage.
• Listened to every episode of the Poker Edge with Phil Gordon on ESPN podcasts.  I’m subscribed and it is a highlight of my morning commute.
• Favorite professional players to watch and learn from.  I followed the WSOP very closely in the last month and watched live updates on the main event on pokernews.com.

But that’s not what it is all about, right? It is about 2 things: fun and personal challenge.

So on count #1-fun? Heck yeah! I love this game. There’s nothing like the feeling of pushing your chips into the middle of the table. There’s nothing like the flop coming JJ9 while you’re holding J9. There’s nothing like the banter at a poker table. There’s nothing like trying to discern somehow what the other guy is holding.

On count #2-challenge? That’s what’s fun about this for middle aged guys like me. It is something like a sport–but my athleticism left a long time ago. It is something like a puzzle or Sudoku–but there’s a real prize at the end, not just that inner sense of accomplishment. There’s the element of a battle, with no physical confrontation. But it isn’t just about having a challenge. Having a challenge is easy. Have I risen to it. Am I getting better? Definitely. I can tell that I’m far better today than just a little while ago. I can tell by my results. I can tell by how I feel. I can tell because I know better now what a good decision at the table looks like and I’m making them more and more (with just enough bad ones in there to make sure I keep my head on straight.)  When I lose, I know which were my mistakes and which were inevitable.  I know when to gamble and when to play tight.  I know how to read hands and players.

So what now?  What do I still need to learn?  I’m not sure.  From here, the most important thing I need to do is play.  The more I play, the better I will get.  I need to make more mistakes to learn from.  Better yet, I need to make more right decisions and see them pay off.

I’m considering a goal.  I played really well when I was focused on beating the FullTilt $3 90-player KO SNG.  Since then I’ve been playing cash games almost exclusively.  I feel like I need a new goal.  Whether it be a bankroll goal or a new tournament to beat.  That’s what I’ll be thinking about for a while.