I decided to play in the Mookie tournament today, as I had not played any cards yet. I got all signed up for it with a few minutes before it was to start, then started hitting some websites to read up on other people’s take on the WWDN Invitational. Because honestly, reading what other people say about it is damn near as fun as actually playing in it.
Unfortunately, I came across the following take on the action at S.t.B.’s website. To quote just one little bit of it:
I fought may way back up until I got knocked out with the trips against the boat. MP decided to limp with Q Q instead of raising. They deserved to lose that hand instead of knocking me out.
Now, I was the “MP” in that situation, and reading this really irritated me. The whole idea behind poker is deception, right? You are supposed to make your opponent believe that you have something other than what you actually do. If that wasn’t the point of poker then we would just play every hand face up. Also, I have been at the table with this guy before on numerous occasions, and had he paid any attention whatsoever to my play, he would know that I NEVER RAISE PRE-FLOP. I can think of probably three hands out of 4 of these tournaments where I actually have raised pre-flop, and it generally always ends badly.
On the particular hand in question, two guys in front of me had already called it, if both of the blinds are in it as well there are five people playing at it. I have the second smallest stack at the table, and even if I was the type to raise pre-flop, I wouldn’t have done it in that situation. I want someone to hit something on the flop and bet into it, I need to take as many chips as I can, provided I have the winning hand. Instead of that happening though, he pushed and knocked everyone else out of the hand. What did he want me to do? Fold?
What really, really, really irritated me though was that what he said to me was “nice hand” (well an abbreviation for it), but what he wrote about it was “They deserved to lose that hand instead of knocking me out.” Maddening.
Yes, I am taking that entirely too personally.
So then the Mookie tournament started, and I was still stewing about that. I played like absolute shit -even worse than I evidently had the other day. I was looking through my hand history at one point and noticed that I had actually folded a king high flush, it was at that point that I knew my head wasn’t in it. I told the people at my table that my head wasn’t in it, then pushed on the next hand, which didn’t quite take me out since the only caller was the short stack, so I had to push on the hand after it as well.
So, note to self: Don’t check out others people’s blogs when you are about to start a tournament.