A better straight

The more I play poker, the more it gets driven home to me that patience is a virtue. You just can't go all in on a whim. Certainly not on a gutshot, and very very rarely on a flush draw. If you want to be successful, you must know how and when to cut your losses. In fact, you must cultivate the state of mind where you feel just as good about folding your hand in a situation where you should fold as you would about raising in a situation where you should raise!

Your state of mind should not be centered around your stack size and whether you're making money; rather, your state of mind should be centered around whether you're making good decisions, regardless of the outcome of your hands. Trust me, if you're making good decisions, over time your stack size will grow.

Tonight, I felt I was making excellent decisions. My showdown win percentage at one point was 80%. When a big hand went against me, and put my chip stack down almost to where it had started ($2,000), I didn't despair. I knew I was in the "good decision" zone. The only quality you need to have in order to do better than your opponents is to be more patient. This is a bit of a simplification, I admit. In order to be more patient, you have to realize when it would be foolish to be more patient, which means you must really at all times have a good idea of where your current hand stands in the range of all possible hands. You just have to be brutally honest with yourself. For instance, the more players that are in a hand, clearly the more likely it is that one of them has a hand that can beat yours. Don't kid yourself about this. You'll only be hurting yourself. Don't fall in love with your hand, unless it merits it! So when does your hand merit your falling in love with it? That's the $64,000 question! Here's a paradoxical finding: if you have 2 pairs, my experience is that you're more likely to lose that hand than if you have a high pair. Don't ask me why this is, I can't explain it. I just know that that's the "poker truth" which has been revealed to me thus far, over the thousands of hands that I've currently played.

I went up about $1,300 early on tonight, but wanted to keep on playing. Then I dropped back down to just a tad over my starting stack. Eventually, I hit an ace high straight, and milked it for its full worth; one opponent had a king high straight, luckily for me! When I raked in that hand, I knew I could exit my night with both chips and honor.

delta: $4,675
balance: $260,404