Doing the wrong thing

I'm shocked. I've actually made it through my first 10K hands, and when you have two jobs, two pets, several projects, a small garden and a wife competing for time and attention, that's not easy to do. I can't believe it took me more than a month to play what Kimseongchan apparently plays in a day. It's not a huge number of hands, to be sure, but it's further than I expected to get. I used to have a student whom I praised lavishly for getting 7/20 for his comprehension - a vast improvement on the 3/20 he usually got. Now I know how he felt.

Half of me didn't expect to make it this far, the other half expected that I'd be bankrupt if I did. To my surprise, I've actually made a modest profit. It's probably a result of the small sample size, though. I'm quite sure it will vanish in the next 10K hands.

I only have 2 main goals for my next 10K hands: learn to play AKo, JJ and TT properly (I'm making losses on those, which I shouldn't) and learn when to fold nice hands like AA when someone's line ought to tell me he has a straight or something.

It's a small sample size and I'm still stumbling along, but... do any stats jump out?



And, of course, the mandatory graph:



On another note, I mentioned to a friend that I was playing online poker. "That's boring," she responded. "I like to play in a casino. I don't care about winning. I give myself 200 dollars each time to play blackjack and just walk away when it's gone. I just want to have fun."

"I want to have fun too," I said, mystified, "but surely it's only fun when you're winning, right?"

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I must hold the record for the daftest reason ever to keep playing poker. I'm playing it because I know I'm bad at it.

Consider:

I'm a mathematical moron. I blundered my way through A level Mathematics not understanding any of it (though still getting an A in the end, which shows how screwed up the eductaion system was). It takes a long time for me to understand poker concepts related to mathematics.

I have no eye for detail. It takes a long while for me to figure out how dangerous a board is and see potential straights.

I have bad multitasking skills. I can never do anything else while talking on the phone, and multitabling does not and, I suspect, will never, come naturally to me.

I am ill-disciplined. When I get to the stage where I actually know how I should play, it's hard for me to stick to the rules.

I am not a great risk taker. Betting high does not come naturally to me.


It's a losing proposition from the start! But...

Besides my full time job, I give English tuition on the side. I tell my students that if they stick at English and follow my instructions they will get better. Some time last year I realised that I was a blooming hypocrite. English comes easily to me (resolutely right brained, I think). The work I do in my full time job comes easily to me. But English does not come easily to my students. Some speak Mandarin at home. Others have never read a book in their lives.

What right do I have to tell them to do something difficult when I haven't done something difficult in years? And, in a way, me playing poker is easier than them learning English. They're younger and they have several other subjects to keep up with. I can learn at my own pace.

In the novel "To Kill a Mockingbird", Atticus says that courage is "when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what."

I'm quite sure I'll never make it past very low low stakes, I'll never be better than most, but if I can just be better than myself...

Foolish, foolish! The very illogic of my actions betrays the unsuitability of my mind for poker! Yet if I was capable of logical actions, I would certainly have the capacity to win at poker. How's that for irony?

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