Coin flips considered harmful

The title of this post is a snowclone (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone) of "Go To Statement Considered Harmful", a famous article by Edsger W. Dijkstra, a renowned computer scientist. In poker parlance, a coin flip is a situation where you have roughly a 50% chance of winning (and therefore, a 50% chance of losing). Clearly, that's a bad situation to be in, especially when you have all your chips in the middle.

Last night, I played very patiently for 50 or so hands, only to lose both patience and mountains of chips in the last 4 hands of the session. I went all in twice in those last 4 hands, and lost it all both times. What caused such irrational behavior? I was baited by the asinine style of an extremely reckless player. It was very clear he was willing to risk his whole stack on any kind of a hand. The problem when you recognize such a player is that it's incredibly tempting to try to teach him a lesson, and get a big boost to your stack in the process.

The first time I hit the felt, my suited ace jack lost to his pair of sevens. The second time, my pair of tens (which matured to trip tens) lost to his jack nine offsuit (which matured to a jack high straight). That second hand, there was actually a third player who also went to showdown, who lost with an ace four offsuit (which matured to a pair of aces). I did some calculations afterward and discovered that I would have been a 71% favorite had I been heads up against either one, but had actually been a 49% dog since I was up against both of them at once. That's a classic coin flip, and I lost it.

I realize it was very foolish of me to be baited like that. The only quirky silver lining to the session is that I set a new record for most chips lost in back-to-back sessions - $160,000! I'm padding my already impressive loss portfolio :-)

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 55 hands and saw flop:
- 3 out of 6 times while in big blind (50%)
- 2 out of 8 times while in small blind (25%)
- 26 out of 41 times in other positions (63%)
- a total of 31 out of 55 (56%)
Pots won at showdown - 2 of 8 (25%)
Pots won without showdown - 1

delta: $-80,000
balance: $1,664,072