Life is like poker

It is, perhaps, a sign of spending too much time playing and thinking about poker that one sees poker parallels in almost every real life circumstance. I'm sure my co-workers are quite tired of my poker analogies to practically everything. On the other hand, I'm quite certain poker has made me far more accepting of many of real life's little trials and tribulations. Suckouts happen. Going on tilt because of one doesn't help at the poker table or in real life.

On the drive to work today I saw some vultures trying to go after a rather small bit of road kill in the middle of the street. There were just enough cars coming through that they couldn't grab it before the next car came by. As I drove past I looked in the rear view mirror and saw two of the vultures go toward the tasty morsel at the same time. They saw each other coming from opposite directions and both stopped short of the prize. As they stood there eyeballing each other, each waiting for the other to make the first move, a third vulture swooped down, grabbed the prize right from between the two of them, and flew away. You connect the dots.

Sunday I played two sessions. The first went quite well, finishing up not quite $2. The second was much more of a roller coaster. I was at one of those tables with a couple huge over-bettors. When questioned about his $0.50 non-all-in flop bet into a $0.12 pot, one player responded that he wanted to price out the flush draws. Four times the pot. Yeah, I think you priced them out. And risked a big chunk of your stack against somebody having flopped a small set against your TP.

I see so many basic mistakes like this and have this urge to provide a bit of guidance. Not that it would be appreciated or heeded. And, really, who could blame them. Would you take advice from someone sitting at the $0.01/$0.02 table? So far I've resisted the temptation, mostly.

Anyway, the second session was up and down. At one point I was close to having to add more chips but managed to double up and get healthy again. Finished the session up about $0.80 or so, giving me a profit of $2.48 on the day.

This endeavor is starting to remind me of my early online days when I was actively bonus chasing and making money at $2/$4 limit. The key then was to identify the bad players and pounce on any opportunity to pillage them. Punish them severely for their mistakes. The profit in the shallow end of the NLHE pool comes from two places: stealing small pots, and taking big pots from players who can't read the board. The latter will continue putting money in the pot when holding bottom pair, no kicker, even when you raised before the flop and the flop brought two faces.

$2/$4 limit eventually tightened up and there were precious few of the easy targets left, at least at the places I was playing. I'm sure the going will get a lot rougher as I move up in limits with NLHE as well.