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

Too many flops

Last night, my stack experienced a wild ride in the first part of the session, then settled down into a long, smooth, and painful descent to the felt. Here are the stats:

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 77 hands and saw flop:
- 12 out of 13 times while in big blind (92%)
- 13 out of 14 times while in small blind (92%)
- 40 out of 50 times in other positions (80%)
- a total of 65 out of 77 (84%)
Pots won at showdown - 8 of 20 (40%)
Pots won without showdown - 2

Here's my train of thought on reviewing these stats:

1. my showdown percentage is too low
2. that's because I went to showdown too many times
3. that's because I saw too many flops

It just doesn't make sense to pay to see the flop with a flat out poor hand, or even with a marginal one. I realize that somewhere along the way I've lost my discipline. When I first started playing the higher stakes play tables again (in March of this year), I was really scared of the amounts, and didn't have a problem folding early and often. Since I had enough success to make it to my goal of a million play dollars (even though I haven't been able to stay at that level) I've become both jaded and complacent. Funnily enough, I realize I need to play with more fear!

My goal for tonight's session is to see the flop on at most half of the hands I'm dealt.

delta: $-40,000
balance: $769,149

An old failing

On Monday night, I succumbed to an old failing once again; on the most expensive lost hand of the night, I fell in love with a stealth two pair and was blind to the straight possibility on the board. My opponent had actually flopped the straight, and proceeded to extract maximum value from me.

This has happened way too many times. I still haven't been able to correct this blindness. Probably the only thing that saved me from the felt was the fact that the table quit on me, and I was wise enough not to join another one.

I'm perilously close to another even crossing, more's the pity.

delta: $-31,160
balance: $809,149

Drawing practice

I last played on PokerStars on Thursday night; I stayed on an even keel and came out slightly in the black. There's nothing very exciting to report about the session, so I'll focus this post on something else.

I've always had at least a slight interest in poker, and it's never suffered a decline. It had a big uptick when I first watched Texas Hold'em on ESPN around three years ago, and from that time I can say I've been seriously hooked. Four years ago, before the uptick, I ported an open source video poker game which had been developed for Linux to Windows. One drawback it had was that it required mouse input to play. Over this last weekend, I enhanced it to take keyboard input in addition, and have used it to get some good "drawing practice" in. What I mean by that is practice at getting better at evaluating a poker hand at a glance, making it second nature to pick which cards to hold.

Five card draw and Hold'em would seem to have little in common, but one thing they do share is the poker fundamental requirement of being able to recognize the drawing potential of a hand. Of course, all poker variants share that. The less mental energy you have to expend on the fundamentals, the more you have left over for the finer points of strategy! I'll be interested to see if the drawing practice helps my play.

delta: $2,000
balance:$840,309

A pair of 200s

Friends and neighbors, this is my 200th post to this blog. Surely a time to take stock and reflect. I remember bragging in my 50th post that my gut feeling was that I was already a more successful blogger (in terms of number of posts) than over half the bloggers on the planet. I now realize that assertion was just so much boyish bluster. Why, you ask? I'll be glad to tell you. Actually, I just did! Think about it for a moment :-)

It's not such a big secret that people love to hear themselves talk, and I'm no different. Samuel Pepys sure knew what he was about. Writing a blog is definitely addictive. Seen properly in this light, there's little reason to brag about having a large number of posts to your name, and even less reason to believe that less than 50% of bloggers ever get to 50 posts.

But what about the other 200 I promised in the title of this post? I'm glad you asked! I hit 200 winning sessions (since I started record-keeping) very recently, on Tuesday night. This will be the last time my number of posts and my number of winning sessions are the same number, so I decided to celebrate them in unison. The only reason it was possible for them to be the same in the first place is that I started recording my sessions well before I started this blog.

Last night, I hit the felt again. Am I discouraged? No. Am I ready to go at it again? You bet!

delta: $-37,996
balance: $838,309

My new favorite hand

Lately, I've been getting dealt a pair of threes a lot, and winning with them. It's my new favorite hand! At least two times recently, my strong gut feeling that I'd be seeing another three on the flop has turned out to be true. Here's how this hand has fared for me the last two sessions:

Monday night's session, first instance:

my hand: 3s 3c
flop: 3d 4s 8s
turn: 4d
river: Ks
result: my full house of threes full of fours wins a pot worth $21,400

Monday night's session, second instance:

my hand: 3h 3d
flop: 2c 7c 3s
turn: Qc
result: I collect $2,400 after the turn since everyone else folds

Monday night's session, third instance:

my hand: 3d 3h
result: I fold before the flop when someone raises to $1,200

Monday night's session, fourth instance:

my hand: 3h 3c
flop: Kh 3d 8s
turn: 8c
river: 5s
result: my full house of threes full of eights wins a pot worth $38,670

Last night's session, first and only instance:

my hand: 3h 3c
flop: 3d 8h Qd
turn: As
river: 8c
result: my full house of threes full of eights wins a pot worth $19,800

As you may have inferred, I reneged on my pledge to stop saving hand histories.

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 16 hands and saw flop:
- 2 out of 3 times while in big blind (66%)
- 2 out of 3 times while in small blind (66%)
- 10 out of 10 times in other positions (100%)
- a total of 14 out of 16 (87%)
Pots won at showdown - 4 of 5 (80%)
Pots won without showdown - 1

delta: $19,533
balance: $876,305

Looking, thinking, and listening

The title of tonight's post was the original title I'd decided on for last night's post before I sat down to write it. When I did sit down, however, the theme which bubbled up to the surface was the difference between short-term greed and long-term greed. I know it's not a good idea to clutter up a post with too many ideas, so I saved the original idea for tonight.

In the session before last night's, I lost the $110K I'd built up because I failed in three poker fundamentals -- looking, thinking, and listening. I've listed them in what I consider to be the correct order of their importance. If you're looking and thinking, very often you can get away with not listening. If you're looking and listening, you can sometimes get away with not thinking. However, no matter how much you're thinking and listening, you can rarely get away with not looking.

Here are my definitions of these three fundamentals:

Looking means determining what hands your opponents possibly have that beat yours.

Thinking means using logic to determine what hands your opponents probably have.

Listening means taking note of the betting patterns of your opponents.

By failing to look properly, I lost a hand where I had a set but my opponent had a straight.

By failing to think properly, I lost a hand where I had a full house but my opponent had a better one.

By failing to listen properly, I lost a hand where I had a flush but my opponent had a better one (the dreaded uberflush). I went all in, and hit the felt.

Thankfully, last night I suffered from none of these lapses.

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 61 hands and saw flop:
- 11 out of 13 times while in big blind (84%)
- 12 out of 13 times while in small blind (92%)
- 29 out of 35 times in other positions (82%)
- a total of 52 out of 61 (85%)
Pots won at showdown - 6 of 16 (37%)
Pots won without showdown - 6

delta: $21,585
balance: $856,772