I have a poker companion that calls me a luckbox. He claims that if he “ran like me” he would go pro. He has gone so far as to say variance is a bitch (for him) and she is all mine (as in, she does my bidding). Well, despite my overall disagreement with him that I am “king variance”, it is hard to argue against the fact that I do seem to get paid for some of my 1% flops and 30% draws. This first session at the casino was an argument in my friend’s favor.
This session was all fun and no work. That made it both good and bad. I didn’t pay close attention to the players to my left because I didn’t have to, or rather, I was making money so why buckle down and do a better job? Isn’t that human nature? Why tighten the financial purse strings if you have a well paying job and the economy is running well. Watch how people start sticking to their budgets and working harder to impress their bosses when the economy slows; things they should have been doing all along. That was me this session. Great cards, easy players, why try to improve my game when the money is going out of its way to come to me?
I flopped the nut flush and stacked the player to my right for over $150 of his chips because he couldn’t let go of his 7-2 suited flopped flush. I flopped quads against a good player (yes I am talking to you Mr. “Variance is a bitch”) and still managed to get $100 from him by the river. It truly is better to be lucky than good (if you really could control her that is).
But in the end, despite my large win, I gained nothing in skill or experience. I made a bad quiting decision by leaving at 3:00 AM, way past the point of me being able to play well. I made little to no effort to type my opponents. I played ABC poker (and there is nothing wrong with that), on auto pilot and made no profound reads or had any good insights. I just hit my boards and kept betting them.
So it seems that for this session my poker companion was right, I can be a luckbox and it seems I intuitively play my luck well. But I posit that it can cause me to become lax and lazy in my poker ability and it is a double edged sword I should work to keep facing away from me.
Stats:
P/L: $486
Hourly Rate: $46.29
Tags: Luckbox · Made Money2 Comments
As long as we are positing things around here….
Did you consider the money you lost by not playing your A-Game? You lost more than you may realize. What value did you give up because you either failed to make a thin river value bet? What EV did you give away in the hands that weren’ t for stacks, but were for 1/4 stacks?
It may not feel like you lost money, because you walked out up - but how much more could you have made if you were looking left and paying attention?
But yeah- you are a luckbox.
Quote [pathwalker]: “Did you consider the money you lost by not playing your A-Game? You lost more than you may realize. ”
No doubt I lost more in profits than I actually made. That is the point of this particular post (although I might have not been especially clear about it). The point of this post was yes, I had a great session from a monetary standpoint, but in all actuality it was a horrible session from a poker skill standpoint. I made almost every bad decision you could make. I just got lucky, not skillful.