The Daily Grind #2

	Constant betting and raising forces this type of player into huge mistakes

I’m writing this from Tuscany where I’m on a week-long holiday with my girlfriend and her family in a beautiful villa on the outskirts of an idyllic little village called Lucca. There is nothing but luscious green for as far as the eye can see. But there is no internet and, as it transpires, there won’t be any for me for another five days.

The thought of this enforced poker abstinence terrifies me somewhat, it being the longest I’ll have gone without playing poker since August 2005. But going cold turkey could be the perfect way to look back at my first full month of play as a Badbeat trader. If you read the last piece you might recall that I signed off with a grim $700 downswing that resulted from attempts to adjust to the aggressive lessons from my mentor, WSOPE runner-up John Tabatabai. It left me with a limp-looking $149 profit from some 4,000 hands…

It doesn’t take long for me to run my $149 profit up another $100 thanks to John’s aggression. Unfortunately, two days later (also thanks to John’s aggression, albeit applied unerringly badly by myself) I find myself just $45 in the black. It’s hardly a surprise that at this juncture Tabatabai decides to step in with some constructive criticism via the wonders of email…

‘The first hand I looked at is when you had A?-Q? in the small blind. I’m already upset that you’ve forgotten one of the most important things I told you at the start about betting amounts. Early position makes it $3.50 and you re-raise to $7.50. That’s a tiny min- raise which gives you no information about the hand whatsoever.

You let shit hands come in, AND YOU ARE OUT OF POSITION! You don’t want to play a big pot out of position with a hand which you need to hit pretty decently. Your second big mistake is when he shoves all-in and you call with A-Q. Unless this guy has been shoving a lot I see no reason why you should possibly call here.’

They’re both fair points and at least John manages to avoid calling me a f???ing moron – in contrast to last time. In my defence, the guy had been shoving light, and at least my Ace was an out against his big pair. He advises me to raise bigger when out of position in an attempt to end the hand, or just not raise at all.

Back in business

Looking back over some of my hands I can see what John means, and a couple of schoolboy errors instantly leap out. I resolve to knuckle down and a week later I’ve managed to grind the $45 profit up to $210, at which point my grasp of his smart, aggressive advice really starts to fall into place – as do the cards.

Despite being horrendously busy with other work commitments I manage to squeeze a few thousand hands into June and not only do I catch up with my pre-Tabatabai bankroll, but surpass it with ease. For better or worse, I start treating each table in a similar way to a rebuy tournament, where building a big stack is just as important as winning or losing any given hand, as it puts me in a position to take down the other big stacks, most of whom have doubled up using ABC poker.

My constant betting and raising forces this type of player into huge mistakes, allowing me to win monster pots – like the hand where I win a four buy-in pot with A-A against A-Q offsuit.

I finish the month some $1,367 up and am left laughing maniacally as I bluff and value-bet all comers into oblivion. Before I’m dragged off to Italy I’m thinking I’m the king of all I survey and that anyone facing me is but an ant to squash.

In hindsight, getting away from the online tables may have been good for my sanity. Lying on the lounger here, the only big question to ask myself is: should I have another beer now or wait until I get out of the pool? Maybe this life of internet grind isn’t so bad after all…