Sunday, August 28, 2005

Poker Exhaustion

On Friday I played my usual tourney, and coasted into fourth place. I probably could have made it one place (and twice as much prize) if I had had just a tad more patience, but once I was in the money, I went all in on nothing and got what I deserved when big stack called me and had one of my cards covered.

On Saturday I played Rake's big tourney with some hot players, and I started out hot. Then I started bleeding as the blind were raising, and I was at 10 M 2.5 hours into the tourney. I lost a couple hands, threw away a lot of trash. More importanly, I developed a bad case of 'flush blindness' in which I failed to see flushes on the board until I had already wagered without that suit. Then my biggest faux pas, I was the dealer, and mistakenly assumed everyone had folded to a raise, and passed the cards to the next dealer. There was some confusion, and the better showed pocket aces and was quite enraged. It was a bummer for the player, and the player took it quite badly, creating quite a bad vibe at the table. I went out within 20 minutes of that incident, in which I raised on good started, caught top pair, and failed to notice the flush again. When I saw the flush, I went all in on a stone bluff, but he was big-stacked enough to not worry about whether I was bluffing. Sure enough, he had a low ranked flush, but it beat my no-flush.

I'm going to scale back my playing for a while. My regular game will be the Friday after the kids have gone to bed, and I'll probably play some on the road. I'm going to bring down my Columbus social group playing to about once a month for a while. Flush blindness is a clear symptom of playing too damn much, as is misdealing.