Digital Thinkbox

So I’m on a 10 session SnG loosing “streak”. I’d like to say it was because of bad beats, unlucky cards, and stupid players. Unfortunately, its because I played bad and made a number of very poor plays. Granted I had some unlucky cards, but no more than usual. Unlucky cards + really bad play =

In order to repair the chip spewing I went to the hand histories to study my play. Between me and my SnG coach I need to work on the following:

Pay more attention to how people are playing

This means
a) Not surfing the Intarweb, but concentrating on the poker game. You know the one I paid money to play in. Yeah that. This is huge. I’ve started doing this, and guess what, I’m loosing. Perhaps I’m getting bored with the slow early play. At some point I said to myself “Most of these guys will bust out anyhow. I don’t need to know how they play”. Well surprise, surprise. Some of these people actually survived and I end up having ZERO clue how they play.

b) Trying harder to put the players on ranges. Sometimes this is hard at the $11 level since these people will play anything.

Watch the stacks

I definitely need to be more mindful of the stack sizes. Not just mine. I’ve missed push opportunities because I didn’t look at the callers yet to act and determine how they might react to my push. This is especially true if I have a pushing situation and have more big bets (BBs) than the possible callers.

For example:

This should have been a push from me. Folded to me, and the BB only has 4.5xBB left where I’m sitting on 8xBB.

In summary:
1) Mind opponent’s stacks.
2) Put them on ranges.
3) Don’t do stupid shit.

I hope I can remember #3.

Sept 2nd, 2006 I ended my 10 game loosing streak with a nice 2nd place finish. We won’t talk about the game that followed this 2nd place game however.