I promised one blog a month and in typical Danielle Andersen style, I’ve procrastinated writing it until the day it’s due. Nice. So, here I am hours before my deadline, rambling with my laptop on my lap in bed. Enjoy!
I just returned from a weeklong trip to the Commerce Casino in LA for some live poker action. I timed the trip amazingly, as the day I left (May 1
st), Minnesota had ANOTHER blizzard. I seriously felt like I was losing my mind when winter pushed into the month of April. For the sake of my husband and child, it’s probably a huge blessing I wasn’t around for a frigging May blizzard. I can’t imagine I’d have been very pleasant to interact with.
As I’ve mentioned before, my transition to live poker was more difficult than I anticipated. One of the things I really struggled to adjust to, and far and away my least favorite part of live poker is the variance involved. Every poker player knows that the bigger the sample size of hands, the less luck plays into the outcome. Since live poker plays at SUCH a slow pace compared to online (I usually see 500 hands/hr online and only 25 hands/hr live), I went into my live poker career with the mentality that I had to play a ton of hours. Knowing I was only out there for 7-9 days, I would try and get in at LEAST 100 hours of play, which averages out to 11-14 hours/day. Sometimes I would sit in a game at 10am, play until 5am the following day, sleep for 5-6 hours, wake up and repeat the cycle. This is SOOOO not the kind of practice Tommy Angelo recommends, but for some reason I thought I could overcome the physical obstacles with enough determination.
In hindsight, I should have been smarter and realized my body was just not capable of keeping up with that pace. As a result of my poor sleeping habits, I noticed a common theme in my results. I’d play sharp and accumulate chips for the first half of my session. Then, my decision making skills would deteriorate, I’d become more compulsive, and I’d end up donking off whatever progress I had made in the last hours of my session. I’d wake up, frustrated by my lack of positive results and rush back down to the tables to try again. It was a serious recipe for disaster, but the pressure I felt to make profit on those short trips drove the madness.
It took a few trips, but a light bulb eventually went off and I had to admit to myself this wasn’t the way to make money. Because I always feel like the clock is ticking, and my time in LA is limited, it’s required some serious discipline to force myself to pick up from the tables even when the game is good, due to fatigue, but the results have definitely been positive. I’m making fewer mistakes in big pots and I’ve become much more aware of my mental acuity. There are a few hands I look back at this last trip where I think my play was pretty questionable, but there is only instance where I can say I played a hand horribly. It involved trying to take a check raise river line against a crazy tilted Russian dude who is never ever folding. I mean, he’s Russian!?!?! May as well take a Sharpie and write “I’m not folding” across the dude’s forehead. In a clear state of mind, I can look at that scenario and know it’s silly to even consider trying to bluff the guy, but in my fatigued state I somehow justified it to myself. If there is a “silver lining” (loved that movie!), to the horrible play, it’s that I pretty much instantly picked up and went to bed. The old me, would have rebought and settled in for a long night of trying to get the $ back.
I’m certain that this lesson will also help me in my online game. Live poker is so slow that it’s easy to look back at big hands and identify mistakes made because you are maybe only involved in a few big hands per day. Online poker plays at such a fast pace that you are involved in more significant hands and probably won’t even remember all of them by the end of the session. I have to assume that playing in a fatigued state online, leads to the same muddled thought process. I just don’t reflect as much on online hands, thus I probably missed it. So, added to my 2013 goals of no Mountain Dew (still staying strong!), and blogging 1x/month (2/2!), I’m going to try damn hard to be very self-aware of my mental state and only play when I can really bring my A game. Any aspiring poker players out there should honestly learn from the mistakes of fools like me. Get adequate rest. Eat well. Take care of yourself. It’s not about how many hours you play, it’s really about how many QUALITY hours you play. I’m confident doing those things will lead to more profit in the long run.
As a super bonus to my new, more balanced mental approach to live poker, I get an excuse to get out of the Commerce and do some kick ass stuff with friends! This trip, I made my first ever trip to Dodger’s stadium, did some shopping, and hit up Hollywood Boulevard for the first time. Also, in a super random turn of events, I went to a private screening of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi with my good friend Jay “Whojedi” Newnum. Now, I have never really been a sci-fi fan so I literally knew nothing about Star Wars, but Jay is a huge fan. He had an extra ticket to this event at a cool theatre smack dab in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard. I knew it was an opportunity most Star Wars fans would kill for so I felt guilty passing it up. I figured if my son grows up to be a huge Star Wars fan and finds out I passed up on this event, I may lose my status as the coolest mom ever. So I went, and had a blast. Jay was able to give me a nice synopsis on the previous Star Wars episodes and I actually felt like I knew what was going on. I will eventually check out the rest of the films and have decided I’ll stop making fun of Jay for being a Star Wars nerd.
Less than a month until I hit up Vegas for my first 2013 World Series of Poker appearance!!! I’ll be updating the blog with my finalized plans soon. In the meantime, I wish you all many blessings and lots of run good! Thanks for reading.
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