Had another insane session last night that ultimately went 14 hours, ending at 10 AM. Gotta love the contrast between my poker experiences here and in LA, as I've averaged 10 hours/session since coming home Tuesday night and have already played over 40 hours here in less than a week versus playing 2.5-3.5 hour sessions in LA and playing 40 hours total there in over two weeks.
Last night started decently enough, as even though I was stuck in 5-10 PLO waitlist purgatory for 2.5 hours, I made an easy, stress-free $800 playing 2-5 nl. PLO got off to a bad start when I found myself in a weird spot.
HH: A couple limpers. Crazy lag player ($8k stack) raises to $50 on the HJ. Tight player ($2800 stack) who's a little tilted and angry with the lag player from a previous hand raises to $180 in the SB. I ($2100 stack) flat in the BB with KKJJss. Crazy lag player raises the pot. Tight player repots it.
Weird spot for me as obviously at least one of the players has AAxx and I don't have the best made hand. However, I still have a premium hand that is unlikely to be crushed, and if both players have AA (which seemed at least 50% possible given my history with these players) then I'm a favorite. I needed 30-31% equity for calling off my stack to be profitable and decided I probably had that. I called and ended up losing to the tight player's AsJsQQ (other player had a junk AA hand).
Ran the #s later and they suggested a call was appropriate, as I have 31% equity against a range of AA for one player and a range of top 5% hands for the other player. Meanwhile, I have 38% equity against two random AA ranges. The kind of spot where calling is profitable but my profit expectation is minimal, for a ~$6400 pot. In other words, variance is fun.
After rebuying for $1500, I built up a nice stack again when the following hand occurred.
HH: Player button straddles to $20. Several players limp. I ($3700 stack) raise to $100 in the CO with J1098ss (hearts), BTN ($3k stack) raises to $395 , crazy lag player ($7k stack) flats, I flat.
Flop ($1260) 10d7d4s. Crazy lag player checks, I bet pot, BTN quickly folds, crazy lag player calls.
Turn ($3780) 2s. Crazy lag player leads $2400. I call off my stack expecting to be an equity favorite as I know this player's tendencies well. We decide to run it twice. Villain turns over his hand and has K653sss for a flopped junk wrap and a turned flush draw.
First river: Kd; I lose to a pair of kings. Second river: 9s. I make a straight but lose to the runner runner flush.
As soon as I lost this huge pot, seemingly the millionth time in these big PLO games I've gotten it in as a favorite and gotten scooped RIT by a junk hand, I thought of my post from yesterday and kept my composure nicely, taking a breath and deciding getting angry wouldn't benefit me at all.
Now stuck $3800, I rebought for my last $1500 and prepared to play my best. Several hours later after playing very well in a now short-handed game, despite making few monster hands and mostly just getting thin value, I had built my stack up to $5k and racked up a winner for the day, stuck a little in PLO but still +$400 or so overall thanks to the nl winning session.
I felt extremely good, and more than that I felt very proud of my mental game resiliency compared to the other night. I am more proud of this session than any I've played in awhile. I'm very excited to hop back into these games after taking a couple days off, especially now that I feel more comfortable than ever playing $5k+ stacks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DrTJO
Certainly some interesting psychological territory here. I wonder how this passage would read if you changed "premonition" to "anxiety". Would this be fair? If so, then might you have approached this "weird feeling" differently, perhaps addressed it more directly? It would seem normal to be somewhat anxious about getting off to a good start to the month or returning to your home poker room after the trip to LA.
Of course, the problem with a "premonition" is that it gives us the retrospective belief that an unwanted situation could have been avoided. That is, our vision of the future told us not to play today, and, yet, because we're not superstitious, we ignore the feeling. Hence, the anger and frustration when subject to a nasty patch of negative variance, not least because random events would appear to conspire against us and validate irrational thought patterns.
Anyway, really like the honesty of your post. Glad to hear you "weathered the storm" the following day!
I'm always glad to see you pop in here as you've been providing some thought-provoking content (btw, I've been enjoying reading your thread). My hunch is that you're probably correct that the premonition was probably tied to some unconscious narrative that I was either trying to perpetuate or avoid that had been the cause of anxiety. Perhaps exactly the kind of narrative that you suggested. And, of course, even though I mentioned that the premonitions have seemed to validate themselves the majority of the time, it's worth noting that I'm probably subject to a cognitive bias that makes me much more likely to remember when they've been validated as to when they haven't.
It's funny, I consider myself a very logical, rational person, but I find myself entertaining ideas sometimes that that side of my brain knows are ludicrous. For example, a friend of mine frequently lets me sweat his cards if I'm not in the hand, and the % of times he has made a monster hand with me sweating has been insane, like top 1% of outcomes good over a decent sample. Two nights ago, for example, he showed me three PLO hands that contained a big pair, and literally 3/3 times he flopped top set and won a big pot. This is totally normal when I've sweated him, and also pretty normal regardless of my sweat, as my friend seems to run 5 standard deviations above normal. That same night, he won a promotion among the 200 people eligible in the room, which is like the sixth promotion he's won playing 20% of the hours I've played when I've won like none.
Obviously, this is all just randomness expressing itself in a particularly entertaining fashion. My friend isn't inherently luckier than anyone else; I'm just as likely to win a promotion the next time we're in the room together as he is. Yet a part of my brain believes that he actually is a lucky person and that this will affect future events, even though I understand on an intellectual, conscious level that such an idea is rubbish. It's a weird cognitive dissonance that I find both a little amusing and a little disturbing.