Chippin’ around
Kick my brains ’round the floor
These are the days
It never rains but it pours
- Queen

I’ve always been told that another element to becoming an expert poker player is the ability to create your own luck. Guys like Ivey and Negreanu seem to get the dealers to pluck cards from the bottom of the deck…and others are constantly bemoaning that they’re always the victim in the ever-present runner runner one-out bad beat story. I’m certainly not claiming true enlightenment here, but I think I’ve got a much better understanding of how each extreme comes to fruition. In a word…pressure.

I think the lesson I’ve learned in the last few days is that you’re either imposing pressure on the rest of the table or being guided by it yourself. The sick beats come when you don’t have the pressure that comes along with being the one all-in. A lot of my philosophy previous to this point relied on strictly surviving the early rounds to get to a point where my raises counted for more. I kept falling into a trap where unless the deck was thrown at me, I got one or two swings at around M7-10 and if it worked, I survived…and if it didn’t, I was at the mercy of pressure. When I got fortunate and the hands worked, I got back in that cycle of just pushing the good hands at the high yellow M and praying to survive.

These little sit and go’s I’ve been playing are providing more value than the pay-offs. I’ve been experimenting with trap tactics in the early rounds, while my M is still green. I’m not as afraid to call raises with low to medium pairs (even out of position) or suited connectors (in position), assuming the folded missed flop would keep my M in the green. It’s the hands where my play is opposite my style where I make the most profit…and the early rounds in the tournament are where I can use that idiom to give me ammunition for applying the pressure in phase 2 and 3. If I bust out of the tournament early because I expected him to fold to a re-raise where I have 10 outs, so be it. If he calls and I get lucky, so much the better. THAT is when the rest of the board needs to fear me. They’ll think I’m just a luck sack, but I control the pressure.