1st Rule Of Poker

The last few days I have been feeling really good about my game. Because of that I am winning a lot. I have been able to make really good reads on people to the point where they get mad at me for the kind of calls I make on them. Here is one example.

I had been playing against this guy for about 4 hours. He has not stepped out of line all night. Here is the back ground information that I used for the hand. He was getting ready to go home, and so had already had one drink (something on the rocks) and was half way through a second. The hand before I was quite sure that he got away with a bluff because he was taunting a really poor player in a way that made me think he had nothing. And after it almost turned into bragging type of taunting. Like making a gesture like his heart was racing or something. That alone made me think that his mental state had been changed from the two drinks.

The very next hand he was in the bb and I was in the sb. The same soft player had open limped in late position. I called with 36o and bb checked. The flop was 873 two spades. I took the lead betting out and just the bb called. The turn card was a T and before I bet I thought it was a card that should scare me so I expected him to raise me. I still bet and he did raise me. Now he could have had J10, 10,9 or 9J. He could have had a lot of hands. But for some reason I just got the feeling that he had nothing but a flush draw. So I threw in the chips to see his action on the river. The river was an 8. Now that should have been a scare card for a lot of hands and thought he would check. But he still bet. I thought about it for a while and then finally called. He said nice call and then turned over AJs, for a missed spade draw. When I turned over my hand he started to belittle me about what a bad play I made. Maybe it was, but I said I have a problem folding heads up when I think I am ahead. He went on for a while about how bad I am, and I said I would continue the conversation after I was done stacking my chips. I don’t think he was happy about that either but the fact that he was a sore loser was aggravating me.

As a short disclaimer to this play, I would never do this in a small limit game. The reason for that is that you have no chance of completely bluffing the hand. I know I can out play the two other players and they are “good” enough to fold a pair. If I was in the game 1 month ago I would never call with 3,6o.

Over the last few weeks I have been trying to come up with as many poker tells that I can think of so sometime soon I will post what I come up with. While I play I usually make little notes on small pices of paper and write about them when I have time well right now I have a desk full of papers and very little time to write them out.