The Ramblings Of A Tired Old Man

Brief Edit: I wrote this post a few months ago but never published it because before publishing it I started to run good and felt like it was inappropriate to moan after having some good fortune. However due to popular demand and after re-reading it I think that I raise some fair points that would be interesting to read. This is the original post un-edited, written 20/02/11:

I went to bed at 4am last night but for some reason woke up at 7.30am and despite lying in bed for the last two hours have been unable to get back to sleep. If I'm being honest I haven't been sleeping properly for months. Insomnia is never something I have suffered from previously, in fact the opposite could probably be said as I used to get more than my fair share of sleep. However recently it has become a problem. And so I decided to write about the thoughts that were going through my head as I lay there.

A week ago a good friend of mine did a four way deal in the sunday quarter million for $16k. He beat 33,000 other people to get that far which is an incredible achievement. The trouble with a game such as poker is the luck factor which can't be controlled. The guy in question is an excellent poker player but I hope he won't mind me writing that he got very lucky repeatedly, which is necessary to beat a field of that size. I saw him win four hands in a row where he was 30% to win and couldn't help thinking that I wish that would happen to me. I am delighted for him that he had a very nice draw, but when you rail someone hit those hands and then you yourself can't win just one of those hands when it is crucial, it does hurt a bit. I wish I didn't feel selfishly jealous in that way but when you play a game where luck is so important and it falls on your friends but misses you, it's impossible not to feel that way. Maybe that makes me a bastard, maybe I'm just human. I'm hoping the latter.

Which brings me onto my next point: I can't outdraw anyone! Spoken like a true fish I know, but to be honest to go deep in comps you have to be able to outdraw people sometimes. I'm not getting wildly outdrawn with the best hand at the moment, but whenever I make a good shove and get called by a better hand, even when I am only slightly behind, I cannot hit. This makes tournament poker extremely difficult.

I know there will be plenty of people reading this thinking that it is simply variance and that at some point in the future I will start hitting crucial hands, but it is hard to find that comforting when the problem with tournament poker is that variance is (largely) irrelevant. You cannot be happy by knowing that despite losing you were ahead because you will never be in that situation ever again for it to go the other way. I'm struggling to phrase this point correctly so I will give you an example. Let's say you are playing two tables of 50c/$1 cash and you are all-in on both of them with AK suited against pocket nines. One pot is $220 and one pot is $150. Now it would be fair to win one flip and lose the other, and if that happens you will either be $35 up or $35 down overall, which is all taken in to your stride for a 50/1 player as it is a third of a buyin. Now lets say you have two tounrnament tables up one of which is the late stages of a $50 freezeout and one of which is the early stages of a $11 rebuy and you are all-in on both for a 500k pot in the freezeout and a 8k pot in the rebuy again with AK suited against nines. Well again it would be fair to win one of these hands and lose the other. But here the difference is likely to be in the region of winning a pot with a value of about $1k compared to a pot with a value of about $10. Now all of a sudden one hand is responsible for a swing of a hundred buyins.

Playing cash you will regularly be all-in and flipping for similar sized pots so variance has a chance to balance itself out, as it will happen thousands of times over a year and you will hopefully be close to even. In tournaments however you will maybe encouter ten or twenty flips over the course of a year where the result is massively important and over such a small sample size variance has no chance of balancing out. You have to be very lucky in crucial pots when playing tournaments because there won't be time for luck to even out. There is no long-run to consider, only the current hand, so you better hope you run good.

I hope at least part of this rant makes a little bit of sense and that you can understand where I am coming from. But then again, maybe I'm just having a mid-life crisis.