Careful what you wish for: the continuing adventures of the Spank E

[Still the Spank E]

I’m a funny man. Not “ha ha” funny so much as “what an idiot!” funny. Funny in a pathetic sort way, would be another, more accurate way of putting it. Here’s how funny I am.

I spent all last week thinking about how quickly I could get the money together to get into a game 1 or 2 levels higher than I currently play. This means playing in a 3/6 or 5/10 game just to get my feet wet, and NOT because I’ve elected myself ready to leave 2/4. I don’t figure I’ll know when I’ve “graduated” from the earliest level of instructional league play offered in the public cardrooms until I’ve experienced tougher competition and let my performance THERE serve as its own determinant.

Makes sense, right? I mean, I’ve done as well as I could want at 2/4 and have now begun yearning to get away from the exhorbitant rake and the long hours required to make even a couple of hundred bucks at these limits.

In any event, I was having a good day on Saturday--up around $170 at the expense of the 2/4s--when I suddenly found myself in an altogether different game: a game I don’t associate with the 2/4 table experience as I’ve thus far being getting it. ‘Seems a couple of players had gravitated toward my table who appeared to be there for the purpose of raising the stakes to go play at higher levels. One of them, at least, I knew was on the list for 10/20, while another made mention several times that he “only plays 2/4 for fun.” A few other players tougher than I ordinarily associate with the lowest of the limit tables the Taj spreads joined, and suddenly I was in a 3/6 or a 5/10 game WITH the dough to play because the stakes were STILL 2/4!

And I blew it! They played much tougher poker than the table usually sees, and I failed to play THEM back tough (or should that be “toughly?”). Oh, I know how to play a tougher variety of poker than I’ve needed to against the calling stations and other 2/4 mainstays, I just failed to do it. It was ridiculous! Here was my chance and, instead of getting tougher I instead suddenly got protective of the piddling chip stack I had in front of me (about $170, as I said), with the result that I ended up giving these better players around $250 by basically letting myself get run off the table. When I got hands I could see a flop with, I didn’t play them aggressively enough PF; I let their raises and reraises spook me; and I did not adust my game when I SAW FOR MYSELF some of the lesser hands some of them were going in with, convinced (correctly, as it turns out) that they would simply outplay me, post-flop.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t chase garbage; though I did continue to try to limp in with hands more suitable to the multiple weak-player pots of earlier in the day, and ran quickly when I didn’t hit the flop REALLY hard, though, in retrospect, a better way of handling some of these hands would have been to play some of the ones hit partially by the flop more strongly. It could have been worse. I suffered two REALLY ugly beats on the river (trip 4s losing to quad 3s, for example), but I wasn’t particulary annnoyed by that, only by MY not stepping up my game when the table took a step up in class.

Financially, the upshot was that I lost $80 on the session (big deal!). But much more importantly, I absolutely squandered an opportunity to practice my tough game against what were—for me, at least—very tough opponents. Instead of getting some game experience and trying out the strategies I’ve read in HEFAP, and practiced against Wilson’s, against Acespade, but not against flesh and blood, played weakly and gave away chips, usually $ at a time. I got exactly what I wanted under the most favorable circumstances I could have asked for (i.e., at the smallest possible limits and with sufficient funds in front of me) and tossed the opportunity out the nearest window. Funny, huh?

Movin’ on up

Like I said, I’ve been thinking about how to scale the ladder toward the higher (i.e., better-paying) limits, and got a lesson the other day which reminded me of something once said about Jack Nicklaus by one of golf's immortals. When asked his opinion of the young phenom then taking the Tour by storm, one of the all-time greats (and I can’t at this moment remember who it was, but it was one of THE all-timers), said of the young “golden bear, that:”: he plays a game with which I am unfamiliar” (a remark Nicklaus himself repeated when asked the same question about Tiger a few years ago). Though the analogy is not a perfect one because I was not ENTIRELY uncomprehending of what they were doing, the difference between the players I was outplaying early in the session and those who did the same to me later was night and day. When people in these forums maintain that moving up in level takes time, it’s just no joke! They’re playing a different game up there, ladies and gentlemen, and every time I think about playing “real poker” against the tight, aggressive players who act much more like the kinds of opponents that HEPFP and TOP attempt to prepare one for, I’m going to think about Saturday’s relatively cheap lesson and actually be grateful that I got this taste of the higher levels for what was actually very little money…and play better and tougher against them the next time.