Total blindness

Tonight I didn't have my normal powers of concentration. Unlike last night, I have no desire to disobey my self-imposed stop loss rule and continue playing. I'm sure if I did, I'd just be throwing good play money after bad. There's no excuse for the total blindness I had on the river of my last hand of the night. After no quality hands the whole night, I was finally dealt one -- a big slick. There was a king in the flop, and I ended up betting preflop, on the flop, on the turn, and on the river. I made trip kings on the river, and went all in. The only problem was, the river king was a diamond, making four of the five community cards diamonds. All I could notice about the river card was that it was a king, not that it was another diamond. If I'd seen the extreme likelihood of one of the other two players still in the hand having a diamond flush, I would have folded. That would have left me with $350 and the ability to continue playing without breaking any of my rules.

This underlines the extreme importance of determining how the community cards can hurt you before you even start thinking about how they can help you. This is analogous to determining the best reply your opponent can make to your proposed move in chess, before you make it. It's such a simple precept, but one that's surprisingly hard to follow at times.

delta: -$2,000
balance: $265,918