Refound My Mojo

Up until a few days ago, the prior year had been a pretty boring year of poker for me. I used to be somewhat of a heads-up specialist – I played over 5,200 heads-up matches in the last 4 years. Prior to that I was a decent player in a variety of tournament structures. After a year or two of only playing heads-up, I finally decided to start playing some other games again. The problem was that while I played so much heads-up, I became an absolutely terrible player at tables of 6 or more. I became WAY too aggressive, wanted to win every single pot, and never believed my opponent held a hand.

Playing so much heads-up makes you that way (if you’re any good at heads-up anyway). When I got back to full tables, I got so bored so fast that I would start pushing people around with any two cards I had, regardless of their play, since I wasn’t paying attention anyway. I would play Mahjong between hands because my adhd was getting the better of me. The problem was that I just didn’t care anymore.

Well, after several months of playing like a total donkey, I finally decided to give my old game a try again. A few days ago I sat down with the intention of playing 10 sit-n-go’s, with the intention of winning and playing smart. I was feeling patient, and the goal was to prove to myself that I could still do it when I wanted to. To be perfectly honest, I expected to take a bad beat on the bubble at some point, get pissed off, then do my typical ‘run everyone over until I give away all my chips’ thing. Much to my surprise, I didn’t implode. Here are my results:

$20 SNG’s at FT.

4 wins

2 – 2nd place finishes

3 – 3rd place finishes

9 cashes out of 10!! For me playing at a full table, that’s the equivalent of my cat parting the Red Sea.

I’m still not sure how I did that, and it wasn’t one of those days where the deck was hitting me real hard either. I felt like I worked for my results, like I earned them. So now I feel like there is hope for me again and I’m going to give it another shot…possibly tonight. If I do, I’ll update it here, although I don’t know why anyone would care to read it, lol. I have a little Full Tilt bonus site that I’m working on atm, when I’m tired of doing that for the night, maybe I’ll play a little and see if the other night was a fuke or not. ;) 

BTW, maybe I’ll write a big article on my heads-up tournament strategy here soon. That’s a game I know well, and I think I can help some players improve their heads-up results.

Comments

  • Avatar of ams_989@hotmail.com
    [email protected]
    April 19, 2009 at 3:49 pm

    im new to the site.gl everyone and see you on the tables. but seriously trip aces looses to pocket queens on the rive. messed up

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