You’ve probably done it, and I know I have. You start grinding your way into a sizeable poker stack, let’s say you bought in for a hundred dollars and a couple hours later you’re sitting with about 400 in your stack because you’ve been playing your tight aggressive game, getting your money in good when you got the chance, and exploiting the weaker players.

But then all of a sudden, you go from 400 to 200 in a matter of 30 minutes. And 15 minutes later you’re back down to 100, your initial buy-in. Then you’re only half stacked 10 minutes later, and finally you went bust on an all-in bluff.

Now let’s take a look at why this could happen. I’ve told you a thousand times that online poker is a game of patience if you’re really playing for profit. And when you’re playing for a while, slowly grinding out a profit, you may fall into that dangerous poisonous trap known as boredom.

I mean, it’s easy enough to do, after 3 hours of fold, fold, fold. But that’s when you have to ask yourself, are you really playing to win. A lot of players say they are, but when you get bored, you become your own worst enemy at the table. You’ll start to get fancy, and you’ll start to make moves you shouldn’t be making on players who don’t even realize you could be making a move on them. You’re calling with any two cards, even with raises in front of you in early position, and you’ve turned from a poker player into a straight gambler. And we all know that the weakest poker player can usually beat the most avid gambler.

So what do you do to alleviate this bane. Well you have several options. You can, first and foremost, get up and walk away with your profit. Or you can switch games, switch online poker tables, cash out and rebuy for the minimum amount and challenge yourself to get back up to what you cashed out with. The possibilities are endless, you just have to be creative. But more than that you have to be perceptive of your own play and realize when you’re making too many mistakes (and when you’re making more than your opponents, that’s considered too many) due to your boredom. If you can break the boredom spell, then you’ll be just fine. But if you can’t you’ll be just like that guy I described above, bust and wondering what happened to your 300% ROI.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 10:56 am and is filed under Enjoy, Gambler Den, Web Of Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.