Over-confidence?

I ended up down about $300 last week after 15 hours of play, so very disappointing after an excellent week before that.

I’ve read other blogs, notably Brian Townsend’s and he has often suffered from “bad week after good syndrome”. I think I may suffer from this slightly. I guess it boils down to overconfidence. Sometimes we have passages of play where we seem to make very few bad decisions. Its likely that there is a lot of luck – unseen luck - in this series of events. For example, a perfect card can come up allowing us to represent a big hand, or a number of big hands and make it easy for us to bluff. Or we avoid scare cards when we are betting to protect our own hand. We might play 5 hands estimating that each time there is a 80% chance that our opponent will fold to a big bluff. Let’s say he folds the first 4 times, then calls us on the fifth: we were right at estimating 80% and overall we made money, but if the first three times happened in the winning week it looks like we are a poker genius, but the next week not so clever.

I made lots of moves in the past losing week that were similar to the moves I made in the big winning week but there was something not quite right about some of them. Its like an inner alarm bell starts ringing as you are about to fire a third barrel chasing a pot you have bluffed at twice already.

The first barrel isn’t really a bluff: it’s a bet that feels out the opponent to see if he has any interest in the pot. The second barrel is an attempt to see if he is serious. At this point we need to try to work out what our foe has and also decide if he is capable of folding. Only when we can be confident that he isn’t strong can we decide that a third barrel might be a good idea. Even then, we need to consider the type of opponent and also think about what he thinks of us. Sometimes there is a plausible story behind the cards and it all points to us having him beat. Tight opponents will often find an excuse to fold decent hands under pressure here. However, all of this needs to be right before we can justify firing again with nothing.

This week I got called a lot more when bluffing than I did the previous week. I guess this was because I had fewer decent opportunities to bluff but still made the moves despite the situations not being perfect. Sometimes I recognised this at the time but still fired: that’s a problem that needs to be addressed. Other times I realised afterwards that it probably wasn’t a good idea. There were probably some other times where it wasn’t a great move but I got away with it anyhow.

It really doesn’t make much sense to try and take too much from one week’s results. There are too many factors affecting these results that we cannot quantify and that are out of our control ie, down to luck. However, its important to review on a regular basis to avoid drifting into bad habits.

The reality of the situation is that the big winning week was not a true reflection of my play, despite my attempts to quantify luck. Just the same, the losing week probably wasn’t a pure reflection of my play either, although its prudent to look more closely at losses than wins.

My 2008 win-rate so far is now $51.70 per hour, compared with $49.10 in 2007, so overall things are going OK.