The Slot Blog

Bluffing with the best hand, is it possible? Sometimes you think you are making insane bluffs, but it turns out you are pounding them with the best hand.

The problem with this hand is not that I am bluffing with the best hand. Or that I am three betting with Jack-high. It is that I am out of position. This leaves me dangerously vulnerable to players who will bluff bet the river if I check to them. So while I may be bluffing with the best hand I would much prefer it if I had position. But I didn’t. This was Jh 9h versus 6c 8d on a board 5h 2h Ts 7d 8c.

When the fish play their pairs thinly, it can be fun. One reason why the online games can be too tough is that even the fish give you a hard time.

There is a breed of fish that constant value bets at you with any made hand. If they think they have you beat, they’ll bet it. They are wrong a lot of times but when they are right you have to pay through the nose. It really can become a tightrope trying to figure out when you can and cannot raise them back. In both of these hands I wimped out, going passive until the river gives me that inspirational card which allows me to raise with a hand that was best all along.

Do the dumb things you gotta do can be a good motto at times. It’s been over a year since I entered my records into my spreadsheet. Part of this is because it has not been a stellar year at the tables. Part of this is laziness, and part of it is a certain comfort that, gosh darn it, I’m good enough.

But the day has finally come, I have begun the massive task of entering all the sessions into my spreadsheet. Luckily the data entry is a nearly 100% automatic task. But I still have to validate and tease out the typos form the original data entry as I played. All those sessions where I played negative minutes just have got to go. Hopefully, it will take less than three hours to do all the validation.

I had planned on taking the rest of the day off as I was a little upset with how the WCOOP event turned out for me. As I had not yet signed up at pokerstars, I had used a Pokerstars Codigo Promocional in order to get a $600 bonus (as I deposited $2k) and be able to participate in the WCOOP. It did not do well but I felt pretty calm and focused so I decided to throw in a session of PLO.

I hopped on a $400 PLO and $2000 PLO table. There was an overly aggressive guy with a nice stack at the $2000 table and he was overplaying some hands. Long story short he flopped top and bottom pair and I flopped a big draw, he bet the pot and I raised the pot, at which point he probably should have just folded but he of course moved in and I called. The turn card made my draw bigger and the river blanked me off. Total for the session? -$2315.87 in under a half hour.

When you are paying the bills with poker and you can’t afford to lose your bankroll, yes you technically have the bankroll for $30/$60, although I don’t even have the standard bankroll for $2000 PLO so that’s double dumb. But when you’re playing for a living I should really be more conservative with my bankroll.

From now on 600 big bets and 50 buy-ins is my rule. No breaking that, I can’t afford to be doing dumb like playing $2000 PLO. After Friday’s WCOOP event I’m going to cash everything out and take a week off. I really need to drive home the discipline factor to myself. I’m going to re-read Barry Greenstein’s book for stuff like that, and re-read the Theory of Poker just to resharpen my game.

Then I am going to come back and give myself hours and a game, none of this play what I want when I want crap. Right now I am going to play drill sergeant with myself. My target will give me approximately 1600 hands a day. At 2 BB/100 I should be able to pull in $640 a day on average. Frankly I don’t see a need for me to be making more than that at all right now. There is just no need to risk felting, I can be happy with $640 a day for quite a while before I move up. I need to put more structure in my poker life. I am rambling and nobody is listening, but I feel like this is therapeutic.

If you like to play at your favorite online casino, there are plenty of games to choose from. Slots and poker are too extremely different games. The question is how much skill is there in poker, or like online slots is it primarily a game based on pure luck?

As a matter of fact in poker getting good hands and winning big pots results from setting yourself up for being lucky. The best players are lucky when they set themselves up to get lucky, and that is how you should play the game of poker if you want luck to be on your side.

This is how luck is created, as apparent luck hides the conceived truth that skills is what matters the most in Texas Hold’em and other poker variations. This is also the case in other games where chance is a factor. But in poker, luck is not all that you need. You mostly need a strategy. It is believed that the more luck you had at the beginning when you got started, the harder it is for you to play poker well, as you learned bad habits.

Every player appreciates poker luck, and would prey to get some luck every time he plays. But, luck is actually not the best friend of a Stud poker player. A bad player wins a pot by luck and he believes that he has been playing like a master. A fish does not know how much to bet or raise, always counts on luck to win a pot, makes gut shot straight draws with only four outs, and many more bad plays.

A fish will hope to be lucky all the time. So, they are considered to have more chance then other players, as they always attempt to be lucky. And they have to be lucky a few times, but at these times the pots might be huge and their opponents will remember them as lucky tunas.

Excellent players on the other hand do not count on luck for winning. They actually always attempt to make the mathematically ideal play. So it may seem that they are lucky when they hit a perfect hand, but they had a positive expected value on their draw. They played correctly and got lucky too, but they are winning players not because of getting chance of their side too often, but because they always make the plays with a expected value.

So my online slots friend, if you prefer games of chance with big jackpots, usually online poker games do not offer that. Better stay at the slot machine side.