Steve’s Terrible Table

We all have moments in poker where we look back and say, “Man it was so obvious he had a big hand there, why couldn’t I just let it go?” Early on in our careers we usually don’t suffer from this too much. We rationalize getting our stack all in on a 4-bet flop with TP2K and losing to a set as a “cooler” or “standard” etc. Somewhere along the lines we are taught that we need to look over our plays and try to objectively determine if we played correctly or not. It’s hard sometimes to think we played a hand right when we lost sometimes, or wrong when we won. It is a skill just as important as learning to read your opponents at the table or calculate odds quickly in your head. I had a spot play at Foxwoods recently where I’m not sureexactly if I played the hand right or wrong so I’ll leave it up to you to decide.

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Ok so it’s a little early for New Years resolutions. I’m not saying that any of these are 100% what I am going to concentrate on either during the new year. I do however think it is crucial to my development as a player to set goals for myself. If I am going to take my poker playing seriously in 2010 and play as a professional I need to meet certain criteria. These benchmarks serve more as a guide for what I think I will need to be able to do in order to not just fade away when this becomes my full time job. Otherwise I will find myself working alongside my buddies at Starbucks wondering how I fell short, my own version of Kinish’s Truck.

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Looking down the line a little bit there are some great tournaments coming up that I am very excited about. In the online world with the close of FTOPS XXXVVVIIQ the miniature version for lower stakes guys like myself is just on the horizon. Back down at Foxwoods, the next Megastack series is going down starting December 15th. Both of these series are events I am personally looking forward to playing in very much and hopefully will be good opportunities to add some more notches to the belt.

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First of all I want to thank everyone for all the comments and messages I’ve been getting over the past week. A bunch of people gave me some really good advice and put things in perspective for me and I really appreciate the time you took to reach out and give your two cents. I’ve had a lot of time to think over the past week to think about my life and the direction it’s going in. I can’t say at all that I’ve come up with any real solutions. For the most part the only thing that makes sense to me was to just reconnect with some friends and work on keeping my spirits up. My time away from the game to think has only made me want to play even more, to get back on the saddle and work on becoming a better player, to push myself towards reaching my dream. My personal life may not be in order yet, but my resolve has returned and for now that’s all that matters.

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Well, this past week was probably one of the worst for me in a few years. Poker wise just hit some rough spots. I managed to have a few really crappy cash game sessions, dragging myself down around $460. The tournament this weekend didn’t go as I was hoping. I made a mistake that cost me about 1/3 of my stack then got it in the next hand JJ v AA and went from an above average stack to out the door. These things happen though and part of playing this game is learning how and when to roll with the punches, but I was smashed in the face by something I just never saw coming. My girlfriend of 5 years, someone who I was openly talking about marrying in the next year or so, called me over the phone and told me she did not want to live with a poker player and ended our relationship.

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