Greetings! First of all thanks for visiting my blog. I hope you like it.
Secondly, are you crazy??? What are you doing here?
(Oh, sorry. Not supposed to offend the readers. I take that back.)
My goal here is to chronicle some of my own very bad poker play, including bad beats, bad plays and missed opportunities. A little bit of definition:
A BAD BEAT is when you play a hand of poker, end up with something really, really strong, and yet still lose the pot to an even stronger hand.
A BAD PLAY is simply a costly mistake, such as bluffing when I shouldn’t, continuing a bluff when I really shouldn’t, raising when I shouldn’t, calling another player’s bet when I shouldn’t, and any similar action that should have been obvious not to do, but I did it anyway and ended up losing a lot of money.
A MISSED OPPORTUNITY is a large pot that I would have won but I was too cautious, or too conservative, or folded too early or failed to bet aggressively enough to build the pot to its full potential.
A little bit of poker background:
I’m an avid recreational player, currently playing $1-2 no limit Texas Hold’em on one of the few poker sites that still accepts U.S. players for real money games. I’ve been playing online for about 4 years, and also play in a monthly live tournament (private game with about 20 players) and a pub league, plus about 2-3 casino trips per year for live play – both tournaments and cash games. I started playing poker in high school (1970’s) when everything was “dealer’s choice” and nobody had ever heard of Texas Hold’em.
Lately my results have been pretty good. I set up the online account with an initial deposit of $100 in January this year. My year-to-date (YTD) results are + $5,395. Month-to-date (MTD) is + $60 which is pretty flat following three really strong months.
Sounds like you are not as bad as the blog would have us believe!? Or maybe you are just a bad liar?
Good point. Actually I think I’m a pretty good player and results seem to support this. But every poker player makes plenty of bad plays. Most of the poker training sites, videos, forums, etc. tend to focus on the good plays, as in “look, let me show you how I played this hand really well and took down a big pot.” I get my fair share of those but there is nothing special to blog about. Plus, the bad plays are where I need to back off, vent, and purge the bad-ness from my system. Hence, here we are.