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Finding a Keeper
By Chips_Middle | March 13, 2008
On my way over here this morning I was listening to the radio and some guy had written in with a story. The previous night, on his way home from work, he had stopped at a garage for petrol (gas station for gas, if you’re American). On his way in to the shop he spotted some flowers. They looked well and he thought it would be a nice gesture so he bought them and brought them home to his girlfriend.
This is where his problems for the evening started. His girlfriend didn’t look too happy and he made the mistake of asking her what was wrong. She replied that the flowers were tacky and cheap and is that all that he thought of her that he would bring her flowers from a petrol station (gas station). He wrote to the radio station to ask what his mistake was.
Well one answer would be that if you knew your girlfriend was likely to react this way, you’re probably better off not buying her flowers from the petrol station. Had you not bought the flowers, she would have been perfectly happy and you could have got on with your evening. So, let the snarky cow go without.Â
The real answer though is that your mistake is nothing to do with flowers, you simply picked the wrong girlfriend. It looks to the guy in the story like he made a mistake last night and he’s trying to figure out what it was. Trying to improve his game if you will. But his real problem is that when he picked the girlfriend, he just didn’t understand the consequences of the decision he was making.
What’s this got to do with poker you might ask? Well, we often talk about not marrying our starting hands.  ”Try not to get married to your Aces after the flop” when you’re playing holdem, etc. I suppose the point here is that there are many hands that you shouldn’t even be having brief affairs with and that not understanding the consequences of that first decision can have you scratching your head when it all goes wrong.
Say you hold:
T 
7 
6 4 
And the flop comes:
9 8 
4
giving you bottom pair and a massive 20 out straight draw (oh, and a backdoor flush draw too).
Suppose that you bet out and get raised and one way and another the money ends up all-in on the flop or the turn and you make your straight and lose to Q J T 9
Where did it all go wrong? Well. Perhaps when you faced action from a decent player on the flop you could have gotten away from it but maybe not. On the turn, if there was still money left and the 7 or T or J fell you could have noticed that you had the sucker end of the straight. If the third flush card came, that should have been pretty obvious. There are several ways during a hand like this that you can be reminded not to buy your girlfriend those flowers. Just fold and get on with having a pleasant evening. Remember that there are no bad consequences to not buying the flowers. Only buying the cheap flowers causes pain.
Again though, the real answer is you shouldn’t be going out with her in the first place. You made a decision earlier in the hand and failed to understand its consequences. The better you understood the consequences of playing the hand you played the more likely you would be to fold post-flop before you got in real trouble. I.e. You wouldn’t marry her.Â
If you really understood the consequences though you’d probably not have dated this hand in the first place. Dump it. Its not worth the hassle. In pot limit omaha we are looking for keepers. Looking for hands that we might be willing to marry. We need to see the flop and find out whether we’re compatible before we make any rash decisions but we’re looking for potential not a cheap fling.
If you understood your starting hand correctly, you would understand that the 2 card gap at the top is a recipe for disaster. You would understand on the flop that while you have 20 outs, a hell of a lot of them are to the sucker end of straights. I’ve picked a rather extreme example here and it is pretty basic to spot the 2 flush on the board and not draw to your straight regardless.Â
The point is, when are you going to notice that you have the sucker straight? If it’s at showdown when you’ve lost, you need to find another game cause poker isn’t for you. If it’s when the card comes then you might save some cash by not putting more money in the pot when you are obviously crushed.Â
If you can spot it when you look at the draw on the flop and know that the turn is hardly ever going to give you a hand you are happy to back with your stack, then you are getting somewhere. If you can do that, you can probably spot it pre-flop and understand that this hand has way more potential to cause you problems than it does to win a big pot. In the end, it’s just a recipe for heartache.
Topics: Journal |
