Thank you Shamus...

As a wide-eyed newbie to the world of poker bloggers, I am frolicking from site to site, adding multiple sites to my trusty google reader. Some I keep for days...some for mere hours. One can only stare at so many screenshots of bad beats before they all start to run together. I have found that I can pick up little "nuggets" from almost everyone, however...even if it's a not so subtle reminder of what NOT to do.

But in the last week, one of the most helpful blogs I've run across is "Hard Boiled Poker" by Short-Stacked Shamus. His approach is intelligent, varied and most importantly he understands that poker and NL HE are not exactly synonymous and all encompassing.

One of the most difficult aspects for my taking poker seriously is the lack of discernible results, especially in cash games. Somewhere a highly paid shrink will say this has "something" to do with my perfectionism. But I digress... I played basketball in high school. If I scored over 20 points and/or the team won, I considered it a successful outing. In poker, outside of a tournament victory, how do you measure success? How do you walk away from the table feeling that you played your best?

Many people consider outcomes/profit to be the barometer. But that is flawed in so many ways. Pure variance/probability will dictate that you can play the best poker in the history of this horrible, neh wonderful game and still finish down for a session or a month's worth of sessions. And conversely, as we're all too painfully aware, the biggest donk in the history of equidae can come out ahead in the short-term.

So if money can't be used...and you sit down at a .25/.50 PLO table...what can be used to measure success? Mentally, over the past year or so, I have told myself that if I could walk away from the table feeling like I "out-played" those during my session, then it would be some sort of ephemeral victory. Sure...maybe I bluffed at a $10 pot with my last $8 to my Full Tilt name...but by taking the chance, I outplayed that guy who called with the runner-runner but flush to felt me. And conversely, if I played spandex-tight poker and just took advantage of those willing to risk their stack with TPTK in a nine-handed Omaha game, I was somehow stooping to their level.

What a destructive and bankroll killing line of thought when you're a self-avowed low-limit player who's more worried about paying for the next pack of Huggies Pull-ups than the next "Bracelet Race." And for some reason, it took reading Shamus' blog about low-limit PLO and just overplaying the nuts to make me come to this seemingly brutally obvious conclusion. So Sunday, I sat down for two short sessions at .25/.50 PLO...waited for what I felt were the nuts...and ended up with a $150 profit for the day thanks to those who were just SURE that middle and bottom two-pair were good on the flop. Did I outplay them? Not necessarily. Did the $150 prove that I'm a better player? Nope. But does it allow me to keep playing the game that I love without wrapping my three-month-old in an old OSU t-shirt to avoid paying for diapers? You better believe it.

*******

The Big Game last night was highly enjoyable, entertaining and predictably mediocre in terms of my participation. As I have in virtually every blogger event, I held my own, got points and bled myself dry somewhere around the middle of the pack. I would like to blame the cards...I would like to blame the Layer Cake Shiraz...I would like to blame the Sopranos...

But in reality, I am just playing too darned tight in the second stage of these tournaments. I'm not talking about blind steals, but I need to trust my post-flop play and see a few more flops. In larger MTTs, I know I can count on a 3xBB raise to perhaps not thin the field as much as I hoped, but does ensure I can set the cost of seeing the flop. Or fold to the all-in. But these darned bloggers are too well-versed in the re-raise and my enormous ego is terrified I might have to lay down that KdQd or worse yet...call with it.