Another bad beat, and it's off for the season.

Much like the other recent games I've blown, I played flawlessly this past Saturday, waiting out the right hands, and playing them perfectly. I played AA perfectly to extract money when I otherwise would have gotten nothing, and then played AK with an A and K on the flop flawlessly, pressing hard as well (unfortunately, one opponent took the very foolish route of paying big into a flush draw, and lucked out on the river - nine times out of ten, I clean up in that hand - it remains the right call, even in that one in ten times when fortune flows the other way). That bad beat put me back into a small stack again, and I just don't have it in me to do the painful play of the slow bleed short stack any more, so I pressed with all my chips every time I pictured myself with anything from a guaranteed race to a guaranteed advantage. It won me several hands, but even that only brought me back up to starting stack size and no more, and I eventually lost the coin flip when called on one of those hands when I knew I had a guaranteed race.

It shouldn't bother me. Any good and experienced poker player would still maintain that in a game like that, with those breaks, you just take the loss as an impersonal fortune, and move on to the next game.

But any other good an experienced poker player would expect to play more often than perhaps one more tournament in the next three MONTHS. That remains the deadly part of this for me... you can't ride out bad breaks in a streak when your games are separated by over a month.

Another bad beat, and it's off for the season.

Much like the other recent games I've blown, I played flawlessly this past Saturday, waiting out the right hands, and playing them perfectly. I played AA perfectly to extract money when I otherwise would have gotten nothing, and then played AK with an A and K on the flop flawlessly, pressing hard as well (unfortunately, one opponent took the very foolish route of paying big into a flush draw, and lucked out on the river - nine times out of ten, I clean up in that hand - it remains the right call, even in that one in ten times when fortune flows the other way). That bad beat put me back into a small stack again, and I just don't have it in me to do the painful play of the slow bleed short stack any more, so I pressed with all my chips every time I pictured myself with anything from a guaranteed race to a guaranteed advantage. It won me several hands, but even that only brought me back up to starting stack size and no more, and I eventually lost the coin flip when called on one of those hands when I knew I had a guaranteed race.

It shouldn't bother me. Any good and experienced poker player would still maintain that in a game like that, with those breaks, you just take the loss as an impersonal fortune, and move on to the next game.

But any other good an experienced poker player would expect to play more often than perhaps one more tournament in the next three MONTHS. That remains the deadly part of this for me... you can't ride out bad breaks in a streak when your games are separated by over a month.

Strategizing...

I've been thinking about it even further, since my post a few weeks ago about how out-of-practice I become from a lack of opportunities to play. I really think that the part of my game that suffers the most is the larger, long range game of choosing when to turn up the aggression and when to pull back and play conservatively. I feel I can play both extremes somewhat effectively now, as well as a couple shades in between. But WHEN to play them... now, that's what hurts when I can't play a real full tournament against living opponents for awhile.

This is largely because there are lots of factors to influence choosing the aggression level at any given moment, and many of them are on-the-spot, such as the styles and reads of the other players in the game, and the organic complexion of the entire table at the moment. Without living people to play against, it is extra difficult to practice making those in-game larger strategy decisions.

Saturday is the final Frog Tournament of the regular season, and as I pointed out earlier, I'm in the lead in the regular season standings by one point. I could approach this tournament in two ways. One would be an "outlast" approach, looking to stay alive at least one place higher than Dustin, no matter where that is (he needs to earn one point more than me to prevent my outright season victory with this last game, so any combination in which I survive longer than him does it - 0 and 0, 0 and 1, 1 and 2, 2 and 3, or 3 and 4)... I think this is a very dangerous game to play, however, and could be a mistake. Being less aggressive is just one more easy fold he could have to build up a healthy enough stack to make outlasting less of a finesse game and more a game of desparation. The alternative, of course, is to play to win. I think I'll be doing that... although it is unlikely the table will contend with as many reall major bluff gambits (when I don't have the cards but I know no-one else does and I've got the show and the bid to fold everyone else) as they usually do (although it's usually a bad beat that I played the right way that does me in, at least one bluff gambit is usually in my past on nights when I get that bad beat and can't survive it... it has to do with whether I'm doing the gambit against a larger or smaller stack than my own).

Well, only time will tell. I think I may fire up the old online poker room tomorrow or Saturday during the relax-time that we've been looking forward to and at least get a little warmed up.