JV'S KILLER POKER:
SORROW

BY: John Vorhaus

You got hammered again last night and now you're feeling sorry for yourself. Well, all I've got to say is stop feeling sorry for yourself - you miserable loser! Haven't you heard of self-fulfilling prophecy? Don't you know that the sorrier you feel for yourself the sorrier you play? Man, don't you even accompany yourself to the table? Aren't you paying attention?

Here's how it went (and don't even bother to check me if I'm wrong because I'm not wrong, and you know it): You raised before the flop with pocket aces, just like you knew you should. But you didn't thin the field, because this particular field was too dumb to thin. Instead you got three callers. Immediately you started to feel sorry for yourself - why didn't they fold!? - and you started to anticipate disaster. Why? Just 'cause. Just 'cause those darned aces never hold up for you; just 'cause there's no justice.

Well, the flop comes J-6-2, and you bet right out. Right on! No one could have called your pre-flop raise with a J-6 or 6-2, could they? Could they? Well, yes, of course they could, if they're bad weak players bent on punishing noble-and-long-suffering you. But let's let that go for now. Let's pretend that only reasonable people with reasonable hands can call your bet on the flop. What's a reasonable hand in this situation? Top pair with a good kicker? How good is that hand against a pair of aces? Better than you hope, my sorrowful friend, and worse than you fear. Let's count the outs.

Assuming that your hand doesn't improve, any jack gets that hand home, plus any card that hits the kicker. So your foe with the good hand has five outs to beat you. With two cards to come, he's no worse than 5-1 against improving. His call on the flop throws one bet into a pot already containing at least nine bets (four pre-flop calls for two bets, plus your bet on the flop.) Of course if the board pairs he's going to need a jack to beat you, but he'll only factor that in if he puts you on an overpair to the board, which he might not do, not in a loose, nose-open game like this. So his call, no matter how much you personally hate and loathe and despise it, makes some kind of sense to him.

So stop sniveling!

The turn brings a brick and you're happy. I don't need to remind you that happy and sad have no place in Killer Poker, but you're happy just the same, and who can blame you? You're one card away from having your aces hold up. So you bet. Why not? What else would you do? You're one card away from happy.

But then the dreaded jack comes on the river.

And you bet.

Why would you do that?

Because you have convinced yourself that your opponent is not on exactly the hand he must be on in order to call on the flop and call again on the turn. Do you credit your enemies with no brains? That's wishful thinking, my friend. You can't afford to think that way. You save that bet on the river when the scare card comes. Of course you're going to call, unless you know that your opponent would never ever make a play at you in that situation. But at least you're only calling one bet, not two.

Pay attention!

Play the hand that's being played, not the hand you wish for!

You're sad that your foe caught a jack to beat you. But when you reconstruct the hand, you realize that he wasn't that far out of line. Turns out that he had J-Q, and who wouldn't expect J-Q to call just one more bet before the flop in a loose, nose-open game like this? You said it yourself, they call anything with anything here. So why should you be surprised when a modestly good hand called a modest raise? Answer: You shouldn't. You shouldn't be surprised at all.

Even if your foe was wrong to call before the flop - and he wasn't, not by his standards - he wasn't wrong to call after the flop unless he knew, knew, knew that you had an overpair. Maybe he even played it too weak. Maybe he should have raised. Or maybe he just figured that you'd do his job for him - and lo and behold, you did! Once he called the flop, he was committed to the river, unless an overcard came and scared him off. But an overcard didn't come. He won, you lost. So what?

Here's what: When your aces got cracked, you went on tilt. Or not exactly on tilt - into an altered state. You figured that if some gonzo bonzo bonehead can crack your aces with Q-J, then you should be able to make any hand stand up, including the 6-5 you were dealt on the very next hand. So instead of folding, you called. Only you're a Killer Poker player, so instead of calling, you raised. As I've often told you, I never hate the raise, but in this case, well, not to put too terribly fine a point on it... you're an idiot! Weren't you watching? You just had aces cracked. The whole table saw it, and nobody puts you on a quality hand this hand. They all know that you're trying to recover from aces. You're trying to get well.

You're trying to overcome sadness.

Sad, sad you. A bad thing happened, and now you feel like you deserve a good thing as compensation. It doesn't work like that. Not in poker, not in life. You didn't make a mistake in the play of your aces. You just caught a bad break.

Which you compounded with bad play.

That was the mistake.

You have no one to blame but yourself.

Sad, sad you.

Go off and sit in a corner and think about it. Until you can deal with adversity, until you can get your aces cracked and come back strong and proper on the very next hand, and on the hand after that, and all the hands to follow, you're not the player you need to be.