Poker Perambulation

$mokkee is a blogger and also an article writer here called smokkee. We aren’t as hip as those who can make use of the full ASCII font set.

His blog is one of the interesting ones. He tends to poke holes in his fellow bloggers idiosyncrasies at pen and table. This includes his fellow “A-listers” — I know we’ve already covered it in a blog with comments from another such dork.

Anyway…

He has this article up on Pokerworks. It explains itself. I have no argument with what he says. What does interest me is the starting hand. It was that powerhouse known as KJ (but it was zooted) and he won with it in descriptive detail. As I read it I thought of another blogger, Dr. Chako blogged about playing KJ a while back. Lost him a big pot at the local casino. It is in his archives, if you go looking. But, I think you can trust me; I am remembering my name fairly well today.

In Chako’s case, he got a bit of criticism for playing KJ out of position. He was beat a bit about the head and shoulders by his fellow bloggers in the comment over that. Doc is pretty honest about his goofs. Somehow, he remembers them as the rest of us rush to find denial and memory loss.

Anyway… (#2 if you are counting)

How does this happen? Poor Doc gets gutted and $/S & M… gets a win and an article to boot. We could wax long and poetic about luck. We could discuss position and the cards that are suitable. Playing style could enter the picture. If none of those are seeming to be working, we could always revert to some name calling.

The thing about discussions — good, bad, or indifferent — is you really need to be there. And you need to be there in the mindset of the actor.

So… (I try to make some sense of this)

Pick the idea that applies best:

• Only fools play KJ
• You can play the hand from position
• You must consider you are the better post flop player
• Never hurts to speculate a bit
• The only difference is one lost and the other won
• I was ready to bluff, if I missed
• All of the above

Well, I think the only sure miss on the list is the last one. Any decent player could select one of the other points and defend it. The win/loss one is a momentary effect; any two players could reverse that on the next hand. $mokkee’s article is about speculating and the hand worked for that. KJ is a very dangerous hand to play but the post flop idea can combine with it to produce huge results. That might even be more true in Chako’s ring game than $mokkee’s tournament.

Cat skinning is art more than science. And, art’s beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So, maybe we’re back to the one I said was wrong – win or loss. That is the important result at the table – at least in the moment.

I may be more sensitive to the idea than others. As a blogger who’s written about specifics, footnoting is way too much work would really screw up the flow. Yet, not doing it makes the idea incomplete at best. I did an article on slow playing AA. That’s a reasoned no-no that stands the test. Yet, there’s reasoning, I hope, in the article I did. Whether it is KJ or AA, we can misplay just about anything. No matter how we analyze that, we use hindsight which has to cloud the discussion.

Whether you pick art or science, cat skinning is a messy hobby.

ADDENDUM:

Well, I’ve halved my $1 table losses. Good day yesterday – very good day. Small creep back after an hour today. Tables both days were moderately sane without the aggression I noted in an earlier blog.

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There is a new service pack out for Windows XP. It is crashing a select group of computer by putting them into an endless reboot cycle. Looks like SP3 isn’t ready for prime time. It is always a good idea to wait a month or so with these kinds of upgrades and let some other poor sap deal with things like this.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Poker Thoughts, Journal.