Saturday, October 30, 2010

Fwepping and follow-through

Is the title of this post sufficiently cryptic for you? I'll be very disappointed if it's not. In fact, I flat out dare you to tell me what on God's green earth it means! I'll go even further -- if you can simply tell me what the verb fwep means, I'll eat my shorts, my hat, and any other article of my clothing of your choosing.

The thing is, I'm not going to give you the time to tell me, because I'm going to tell you. I know that's sort of cheating, but there's not much you can do about it! :-)

Fwep is an acronym which stands for "fold with extreme prejudice". I'm trying to ramp up my fwepping skills. To the compleat fwepper, any unsuited, unpaired hand containing a deuce or a trey is immediately fwepped. No poker brain cells are sacrificed in the execution of this action. If you play long enough, as I'm beginning to believe I have, nothing can convince you that anything good can ever come of such a hand.

That's all very well and good, but what's the significance of "follow-through" in the title of this post? I'm glad you asked, I really am. What I'm talking about is the follow-through of a golf swing, and how it applies to poker. Bear with me; you'll be glad you did!

Full disclosure: I'm not a good golfer, never have been, and never will be. However, that doesn't preclude my being an avid golf fan, nor my having a finely-tuned sense of what it takes to play high-level golf, even though I don't have a snowball's chance in hell of ever attaining such a skill level.

I've penetrated, through ratiocination alone, the greatest secret of a successful golf swing. It seems so incredibly simple, and yet at the same time it's incredibly profound. It makes no sense at all, and yet on another level, it makes perfect sense. And I'm about to share it with you, gratis. All the aspiring golfers of the world should be waiting with bated breath for what I'm about to impart, even though this is a poker blog!

It's simply this: the ball won't go where you want without a proper follow-through. I'll bet you're feeling incredibly cheated by this facile dictum, but allow me to try to explain my wonderment. What I want to try to impart to you is the incredible mystery of the flight of the ball being influenced by the path of the clubhead AFTER THE IMPACT OF THE CLUBHEAD WITH THE BALL HAS ALREADY OCCURRED! Think of it for a second! That clubhead should be able to do whatever it wants after impact! It should be able to do an Irish jig, Brownian motion, or whatever crazy dance it wants after impact, right? Because, since it's no longer touching the ball, it shouldn't really matter what it does, right? Wrong! It matters! Oh, does it matter! There's literally nothing that matters more.

It's hard for the poor brain to comprehend, but the success of the golf shot depends on the totality of the swing, not simply the rather negligible moment of impact. If you finish well, it will have turned out that your impact was a good one; if you don't finish well, it will have turned out that your impact was all shot to hell. This seems to stand causality on its head; how can a later event influence an earlier one? That just isn't cricket, to use a British term. But oh my friends and oh my neighbors, it IS cricket.

Now I seem to hear you asking: how the hell is this blowhard going to apply his whacked-out theories about successful golf swings (and why should we even be listening, by the way, since he's already admitted he's a for-shit golfer?) to the sphere of poker? Patience, grasshoppers, patience!

I strongly believe that the success or failure of a poker hand largely depends on your committing wholeheartedly to its success or failure from the earliest possible moment. That means that you should either fold immediately, or hang in there till the very end. Of course, that's not really practicable for every success hand. However, it is practicable for every single failure hand! Fold your failure hands with extreme prejudice before the flop! And count yourself lucky!

Last night, I didn't quite achieve my pre-session goal of only seeing the flop half of the time, but I came close.

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 56 hands and saw flop:
- 8 out of 9 times while in big blind (88%)
- 7 out of 9 times while in small blind (77%)
- 20 out of 38 times in other positions (52%)
- a total of 35 out of 56 (62%)
Pots won at showdown - 4 of 7 (57%)
Pots won without showdown - 3

My discipline was rewarded; I like this fwepping thing!

delta: $12,600
balance: $781,749

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