It wasn’t long before I learned to be more disciplined and began to eek out small profits. While I wasn’t 1/10th of the player I am now the players were bad and just a little hand selection coupled with some discipline made me a slight winner. Slight meant I still whined. No one likes to lose but I often felt guilty about my behavior no matter how it may have been perceived (people always said it wasn’t as bad as I thought). Now though, it changed, you see winners can’t whine, winners also can’t taunt if you are a winner you should shut the fuck up and count your money at the end of the year. The guys who ran the game made sure I knew this, otherwise, I wouldn’t be invited. That was almost 15 years ago.
I have talked about this a lot and I don’t think I will ever stop. This site is for everyone, winners and losers alike. Too often poker websites become all about winning and actually, in my opinion, shame losers into leaving the game. In my world I know a lot of very successful people that don’t need to win at poker and so it isn’t as important to them. Even in my case I gamble on things I don’t have an edge in and I don’t think that makes me a bad person and certainly I wouldn’t like to be taunted as I was doing it. Really, do you ever see that? After someone deals a Blackjack against your 20 you might rip their fuckin throat out if they did a rain dance afterwards.
Yet in poker it happens all the time. I am not referring to Humberto Brenes or many of the other people who are trying to capitalize on their fame. I am talking about the nit that plays straight up and only shows the nuts, meanwhile he occasionally jabs the bad players, in poker parlance we refer to that as “tapping the glass”.
Today I was playing and one of the guys that likes to gamble up and left the table after he was tired of being put down by a regular for playing bad. Which surprised me a little so I opened chat to see what happened, sure enough the gambler was chased away by the nit. I then saw that the gambler was sitting at another table so I stopped by and asked what was up. He confirmed that he will not play in a game with the nit. Which is certainly cool by me, the nit often says stupid shit to me that is annoying but I would crush him in almost any scenario. Only thing is, there isn’t a lot of profit in beating nits. So I played this other guy and he beat me out of about a dime before the phone took me away from the game. I have kept chat closed lately but I let him know not to bother with the nit, the nit is just an angry old man with nothing better to do than snap at people on the internet.
Another thing is that when you play short handed a gambler actually is playing pretty close to right. Not a lot of nits want to play against a gambler in this situation. But hustlers will. Next time you talk shit to a fish think about what that makes you and maybe you will never do it again.
This will be my last update giving bankroll figures. Today I left at a high water mark of 15k, couple that with the 5k I started with and you have yourself more than 300 big bets, what most pros consider an acceptable bankroll. I only began to mention the bankroll figures as context to my story about running good. Now that the context is gone I will just focus on the circumstances around the play unless the amounts become a part of the story again. It is somewhat emasculating being a mid limit grinder in a blog with some big ballers but I hope it helps to get lots of different points of view. While it’s great to hear that