TalkFlop.com Blog

Being on a roll, especially early on in a tournament, can be wonderful thing. Not so great however when the well runs dry and you’re left defending a nice large chip stack with nothing but junk cards and increasing blinds. Read on…

The first few hours of the night were beautiful. Good cards, some luck thrown in, and a table that didn’t change players and allowed me to get into a rhythm. I was getting favorable cards and was able to establish some aggressive play early on (*note: not exactly my style of play, but what the hell it’s fun to mix it up when you can). I took out two players (the person to my left took out the other three as the game wore on) and was sitting behind a nice pile of chips. I even found a Q-high straight flush (read about that hand in a later post) on the river to really hammer home the fact the cards were falling my way!

And then…

Then what? Well, let’s take a 15 minute break, grab some food, up the blinds (throw in an ante), add a new player to my left who likes to start each hand either folding or raising AT LEAST double the BB, and suddenly I can’t get a decent hand of cards to save my life! Plus we were playing four-handed so the blinds were coming around awful quick. I spent the next several hours looking for something to play with and not getting much.

Anytime I had something half way decent, like somebody to my left would throw down a monster raise, or the occasional maniacal pre-flop “all in” and I would end up folding – and usually after seeing the flop I was glad I did. My whole game went from attack mode to defend mode, and from there it was all downhill. I suppose I could have represented some better hands, but anytime I tried to use my chip stack to bully someone, they raised into my weak-assed hole cards and I ended up throwing away chips.

Looking back, I think this is the first time I’ve left a game where I didn’t win and still I wasn’t in a bad mood. I had fun, got some good cards for a while, put some players on hands, and paid more attention to things like pot odds and hand odds to help me make some decisions on whether to stay in on a hand or not. And it even seemed to work for a while. The way I figure, if you can spend a night getting even a little bit better at your game then it’s all worth it!