Poker Taught me to Take More Risks
Experience #2:
I recently joined my first poker tournament … and got absolutely crushed!
I believe the poker term for me is a fish (someone who bleeds money to better poker players). I have recently been playing ultra-low stakes online poker and even took a beginners course on strategy. Ok, I took 1/3rd of the course and then got bored and went to the tournament. I think the results speak to how well that strategy worked out for me.
I was too timid if I am being perfectly honest. I barely bluffed, and when I did bluff, I was way out of my depth and should have recognized that my range was covered. I had some early luck to be fair, and lasted about an hour and a half out of a 7 hour event. However, poker is both a game of luck and skill, and my luck far outweighed my skill on this day.
Three of the players at my table were quite good! I found this out by chatting with them and learning that they had all gotten quite far in previous tournaments, inside the final 5. Watching how they played, I saw that they had a range of styles. Two of these players seemed to prioritize battling it out, while bluffing a lot (or so I think), while the last of the two played a very tight and controlled style. He was also the most reserved of the three, and did not laugh or joke as much causing me to have no clue whether or not he was bluffing.
Slowly I got bled dry, folding quite a lot of hands and not calling when I should. Getting down to my last couple chips I went all in with Ace-King suited-hearts preflop and was called by two of the three experienced players immediately. I was lucky enough to flop two more hearts and get the fifth on the turn. This kept me in a couple more rounds, but soon enough I was in the same position, with almost no chips left. I shoved all in preflop again, this time with tens, but was beat out by a pair of aces.
I stood up from the table in defeat, thanked the dealer and retired from the casino. Surprisingly I felt quite good, despite my poor showing and I was able to resist the call to play a couple hands of blackjack before leaving the casino.
My Final Thoughts:
My inability to bluff might be a product of my inability to take risks in general. Pushing my self to play more poker and practice risk with small amounts of money will be good exposure therapy to monetary risk. This is the type of risk I am the most adverse to, growing up in a family that taught the value of saving as much as possible.
Thomas Reed
