thepokerbaffer

What did you do on Saturday night?
I went to a mental party and snorted cocaine off some hookers’ bottoms.

Nope. Lied.  Didn’t do that.
I stopped in, put my slippers on, and bubbled three, large field, micro-tourneys with AA, KK, and AA, all in pre-flop against 1010, A4 and JJ respectively.
After the third one, I exploded into apoplectic rage, stormed onto my balcony, swore aggressively at some sleepy pigeons and angrily threw one of my slippers into the abyss of the Salfordian night.

All of which activity is definitely, 100% valid, clinically recognised, therapeutic technique for dealing with BubbleRage.

Once my slipper dodging, avian neighbours had enjoyed a full plate from my eclectic, sweary buffet, I returned to my laptop. By the time I’d calmed myself down and apologised to the pigeon community of Salford, I just felt too drained for any more poker.

As the rage passed, I felt ever so forlorn. Seriously, before you read on, maybe you should put some haunting, violin-y music on in the background to help you connect with the forlorn-ness of my Saturday night.
Beats happen, I know this, people get knocked out of tourneys, I know this too; but there’s only one BubbleBitch per tournament, and on Saturday night, I was once, twice, three times the BubbleBitch.

There’s something about a beat on the bubble that really kicks me in the girlie-goolies, it feels so much more painful than beats earlier in the tournament.

At the level I play, it’s not really the money, or even the proximity to the money. Okay, if I bubbled a big buyin event that I’d sattied into, then the proximity to the money would be sickening, but that’s not what happened here, I’m not playing $3 tourneys to be happy enough with a min-cash.

I think my main frustration with BubbleBeats is that it feels like such a waste of time. I’ve managed to get that far and get it in good after three or four hours, and I’m on a hair thin line of having nothing to show for it at all. Those precious hours are in danger of becoming an absolute waste.
I’m not saying that cashing for $6.18 after 3 hours is representative of a healthy hourly rate, but, at least it’s not an absolute waste.

It’s not just the money, it’s the entertainment value; when I sit down for a large field tourney, I plan to win it. Depending on the entries and the structure, I work out roughly how long it’s going to last, and I then expect to be busy with poker for that much time. On Saturday, I could have gone out instead. I could have gone to karaoke, which I love to do. The karaoke bar closes at 2am, then we’d probably go to the casino for a cocktail and a punt, and I’d wander in around 4am, a bit tipsy and entirely un-forlorn.

Bubbling out of a tourney feels like being on a night out, and then being unexpectedly teleported home just as it starts to get good. Suddenly, you’re stood in your kitchen, in full make up, heels and a party gown, but your night is over and you may as well cry-wank yourself to sleep. It was only around 1am and I’d expected to be busy until 4am. What is a girl to do?

Is this where I turned it round? Is this where I went out, and joined the throngs of Saturday night, beer-soaked revellers? Found some cocaine and hookers? Nope. I opened my laptop and started reading about poker; no music, no distractions, just poker.

I’m very lucky, and I have clever friends who have given me birthday/Christmas presents of discs and dongles full of poker texts, I have a wide library to choose from. I also use Google and a card-odds calculator, cos the internet is good, innit?

I’m often called a ‘nerd’ and a ‘geek’ by my friends, because they think reading is boring, and sometimes it is. I’m a very experienced reader, and I’m not afraid to say something is boring and toss it aside for bit. I don’t even think I’m being rude to the writer, I’m not blaming them for me finding it boring, maybe it’s too clever for me, a lot of things are. When this happens, I just leave it, and move on to the next thing, I’ll find something that does capture my imagination, and I’ll read that instead.

I’ve identified a massive problem in my mid/late tourney game. I am too often running up to the bubble with a decent stack, and then coming out the other side with a small/push-or-pass stack. This can’t just be me getting unlucky, it’s happening too regularly. I can blame the cards/algorithms/pigeons as much as I want, but at some point I’m going to admit I need to change something up and turn to others for help.

Hello. My name’s Kat and I’m A Big-Stack Nit Around The Bubble.

I’m not going to bore you with what I learned, I want to make the point that reading can be less boring if you can be more specific with what you want to read about. When you’re searching for a particular topic as opposed to just wildly browsing, you’re more likely to encounter an article that speaks to you, makes you think, and therefore changes you up.

I passed just over two hours reading and watching strat videos. My eyes did hurt a bit at the end of it, but probably no more than if I’d final-tabled and won the tourney I’d been playing, which had been my original plan. I’d planned to have eight hours of poker on Saturday night, and I did, even if the last two hours were not spent playing.

I learned very early on in my poker career that I am over-emotional, and prone to the ‘passion-tilt’. I have a much greater handle on this than I used to, but the treble-bubble on Saturday night fired up some of the old rage in me. I’d love to say that I control the rage via meditation and a careful daily balance of proteins, but I have a much simpler system.

If I know I’m too tilted to play my best, I just stop playing.

I used to fill the time with online bingo/chess/strategy games, which are all very calming, but didn’t necessarily remove the passion-tilt feeling. I’d often wake the next day, sit down for another session, and sigh in expectation of the same result from the very first hand onwards.

When I read/study poker in the newly available time originally allotted to poker anyway, I find that the next day, I sit down to a new session with a bit more hope. I feel like I have something else to expect from this game, because I feel like I have something new to bring. I’m not saying I get instant results every time, that would be ridiculous, but I am saying I see results over time, and those results are definitely worth the reading time.

I prefer my new regime of reading as opposed to tilting away more of my poker cash, either on poker or internet bingo. Next time you bust early in an ugly spot, don’t just late reg the next available comp, close the site and get reading; doing exactly that is not just costing me less money, it’s actually earning me more money. That’s definitely a good thing, I read it in a book once.

Read on PokerWinners.com