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May 21, 2004
RGP
Well the experiment is continuing. I do not have any set amount of hours of play time before I determine whether or not it was a success, but I will probably run at least 200 hours of it. Seeing as I get about 200 hands per hour that is almost as good as playing 1000 hours in a casino. This should be long enough to get my hourly rate within a decent range and allow me to compare it to my normal $10/$20 6 max rate. If the experiment turns out to be a roaring success as it seems to be so far I will give it a shot at the $10/$20 tables too. The people at these $5/$10 tables are insanely passive and incredibly stupid though so I do not know if it will work at $10/$20 6 max. As bad as everyone there may be they are still far better than these people at $5/$10.
The only thing I miss about $10/$20 was the ability to trash talk people into playing me heads up $15/$30. It doesn’t seem that anyone at a $5/$10 table is willing to play that high, and given the exorbitant rake at Party when playing heads up I am not going to play it below $10/$20. One guy today said he would do it then backed out at the last minute, and that is as close as I have gotten. I also do a little less trash talking now as it is somewhat hard to focus well on both games and engage in too much conversation, but I still manage to do a bit. I was starting to think I should maybe just quit altogether but then a hand came up that reminded me of its other benefits.
In the hand I had pocket 10s and raised under the gun only to be reraised by some dunce I had been bad mouthing for a while. A perpetual calling station called as did the big blind so I just called and the flop came J 10 5 rainbow. Two more worthless cards came, with me and the reraiser capping every street and the calling station pushing his favorite button each time. Sure enough the reraiser had A J off. He capped flop, turn, and river with one pair. So I ended up taking down a $250 + pot, which is huge for a $5/$10 game.
Now any sane individual may have capped the flop and even raised me on the turn, but when I came back over just about anybody with any sense would have slowed down. Not this guy, he came right back over, then raised me on the river and capped it when I reraised. Why? Because I had gotten his ego involved. My insulting his play made him want to beat me so much that it was all he could think about. It was for the same reason that he rebought later when he went broke.
People always say things to me about how I shouldn’t trash talk. They say it will make players play better or just leave the table. Both of these are so untrue, as it has the exact opposite effect. I was reading Amarillo Slim’s book again today (not often I read a book twice) and he explained it best when he said “The more you can get someone to want to beat you, the more likely you are to make him emotional, so that his ego gets in the way of his brain.” This is much better advice than the “don’t tap on the glass” crap you will read in a Sklansky book (and that every idiot on Party seems to have memorized) when it comes to online poker.
Also this week I have had a blast flaming away at the idiots on RGP. These people are so clueless. RGP, for those who don’t know, is a newsgroup (rec.gambling.poker) about poker and is pretty much the world’s number one source for poker misinformation. If you ever want to see a bunch of people who couldn’t beat a $1/$2 game trade advice on how they should have played textbook hands in $11 sit ‘n go tournaments, this is the place to find it. In addition to being bad at poker most of them probably couldn’t write a C paper for a sixth grade English class either. When you are writing something that potentially thousands of people are going to read you should at least be coherent. Many of them write in all caps, use zero punctuation, and have one run-on sentence after another. There was one particularly insidious article this past week by some guy who tried to play poker for a living, could only make $42k a year at it, and went to some finance job where he is getting paid over $80k. How anyone can get paid $80k a year and not know the difference between “then” and “than” is beyond me. So I obviously couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ask how he managed to get his MBA without being able to write better than a 4th grader and somewhere in my post I ended a sentence in a preposition.
Now here is the funny part, where you get to see what sheep these people are. Some dumb bitch made fun of my ending a sentence in a preposition and at least 10 people chimed in about how witty she was and how it put me in my place. The only problem was that I actually know the English language and happen to know that a sentence in a preposition is perfectly acceptable English. I recommended that they Google for “end sentence in a preposition” and if they did they would have seen that the first 3 links are all sites that explain the origin of this “rule” and how it is not in fact a rule at all. I got some more good material out of it all for some more flames though. What a way to pass the time.
Posted by themaroon at May 21, 2004 6:32 AM
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