Weekly column “Mucked” by Shortstack Bullets
My tournament poker career has been filled with many highs and many lows. I have won a couple of tournaments (the prestigious inaugural All Africa Tournament topping my list of course,) made numerous final tables, lost it all near the bubble after fighting hard for many hours or just made cameo appearances on the odd particularly horrible day when the poker gods favour was being courted by someone else.
Like every poker player, I remember the losses with alarming clarity and since every poker player loses more tournaments than he wins, I have many memories of my failures. I have categorised them as follows: The bad beats are the stories that we relate with incredulity and disdain because it wasn’t our brilliant play that let us down but rather the luck of some donkey. Then there are the unlucky all-ins when our cowboys are outgunned by the mug with the rockets. Lastly, in this batch of losing stories, there are the days when the cards simply dry up and you pretty much watch (helplessly) as your chip stack erodes with the ever-increasing blinds.
The final category is the one that very few players talk about. This happens because we don’t really want to relate stories in which we look like idiots. In these stories, we seem to have forgotten everything that we learnt after the hand rankings and could result in our flattering (and generally self-chosen) nicknames changing to something more realistic. “Palooka” springs to mind!
Here is a list of my favourite dumb moves that generally appear after a good run with a respectful chip stack quite deep into a tournament. Consciously deciding to steal as many blinds as possible (you don’t really need them, but…) is a good idea and losing hand after hand.Brazenly deciding that you should knock everybody out of the event so you call every short stack all-in with your rags (they are live cards right?)Over- or under-playing hands because you feel its time to change gears and end up being too aggressive or too timid.
The root cause of all of these mistakes is a loss of focus. After many hours of intense concentration it is too easy to forget the fundamentals and start calculating what you are going to do with all of that prize money. What inevitably happens is that the prize money goes to someone else and the dreams of extravagant spending sprees remain just that.
The really nice thing though about doing something really asinine, is that it helps you to learn something that you already know…I learnt what I already know
