Stuck in reverse

Tonight I went down in flames for the third straight session. Despite that fact, I don't think I played all that badly. I didn't win a single hand, it's true, but my reads weren't terrible. It was the night of the lost straights, as fully three of my hands would have made a straight if I'd had the guts/stubbornness/recklessness to stick them out; all of them would have won. I think that tipped the balance against me. You only get so many chances. The thing is, two of the three were gut-shots, so I don't really blame myself for bailing.

You have to make the proper, correct plays, regardless of how the poker gods taunt you afterwards! You should actually feel better about making correct plays and losing than you should feel about making risky plays and lucking out. I say that, and intellectually know it should be true, but I have to admit I feel great when I make bone-headed plays that actually pay off! Then I pat myself on the back for my prescience, guts, and genius :-)

Let me take a good hard, honest look at my last hand of the night. I started the hand with $829 in chips, more than a third of my starting stack. I had the button, and was dealt ace seven offsuit. After a small first round of betting, the flop came 2 Q A. The table checked around to me. I felt good about my pair of aces, and bet a whopping $10. Someone raised me up to $235, and I immediately called. Not good! Not good at all. As the narrator in the TV cartoon version of "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas" said, "Stink, stank, stunk!" Why didn't I at least flinch? Why would I call immediately? That was one of those lapse-in-judgment moments. I think the answer is that I was fooled by the oldest trick in the poker book, the tried-and-true check-raise. Since the table had checked around to me, I had an inflated sense of the worth of my hand. I can say now, with the benefit of hindsight but also logic, that that immediate call was my worst decision of the night. Now I was in the psychological bind of essentially being forced to defend my first poor decision by making secondary and tertiary poor decisions. Suffice it to say, I ended up going all in, and my pair of aces and deuces lost to aces full of deuces. When you run up against pocket rockets with only a single rocket in your holster (I know, I'm mixing metaphors again), you're basically screwed six ways to Sunday.

delta: -$2,000
balance: $273,698

P. S. I've been reading reviews of poker nonfiction books lately, and found that quite a few of these books are available on the Amazon Kindle site. I plan to download "Positively Fifth Street", by James McManus, and start reading it tonight.