The beauty of caution

Thinking about what to discuss in tonight's post, I thought about how my play has changed of late. It was a little surprising for me to realize that I haven't bet the pot in a hand in quite a long while. I guess I've unconsciously come to the realization that while betting the pot is not the best strategy for maximizing one's profit, it's an admirable strategy for losing large amounts of chips. If you have the best hand and bet the pot, it's likely your opponents will fold, and you won't have extracted any extra chips out of them. If you're only hoping you have the best hand, bet the pot, and get a caller or two, it's more likely than not that you don't actually have the best hand. Holding back from such a large bet helps in both situations. In the first one, you might actually extract more chips from your opponents. In the second one, you end up losing less chips than you would have if you'd bet the pot.

So I'm adding another rule of thumb to my growing list -- bet the pot rarely, if ever. I'm coining this strategy "the beauty of caution". You saw it here first :-)

Tonight I settled for less than double my starting stake again. As I said last time, as long as I'm avoiding losing sessions I'm happy.

I discovered today that one reason my Site Meter stats were all zeroes was that there was a little piece of HTML initialization I had to do to get them going. I've done that, so now the numbers will be telling me the awful truth.

Final winning hand of the night: trip jacks, to the tune of $1,260.

delta: $950
balance: $269,841