This topic came up while I was playing some texas hold’em poker at a home game a couple of weeks ago.  What would you rather skill or luck?  Which out plays what?  Now since I don’t believe in luck I am definitely a skill believer.  I feel that the odds may work against you in a hand, a game, a week, a month even a year.  However staying to a truly solid game will eventually win out and I find that the better I play it happens that the “luckier” I get.  Any thoughts?

Ok so I just finished 2 sit-n-gos and in both i had my ass handed to me.  I am going to write about the first one.   I had pocket queens and made a pot raise preflop in position and get 1 caller.   The flop comes 6 4 2 all spades.   I push and the caller calls me.   He flips over Qs6c and of course catches a spade on the river.  Now the call on the flop doesn’t bother me, but WHY THE FUCK IS HE EVEN THERE?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?  HOW ARE YOU GOING TO CALL A POT SIZED RAISE PREFLOP WITH FUCKING NOTHING?!?!?!?!?!?   I don’t get it.   I play everything correctly and these donkeys still empty my pockets.   Now the second one I guess the last hand I should have won having him dominated AQ to A4 but the hand previous i made a terrible call to get me crippled so a bad decision earlier led to that beating but the first one . . . . WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!?!?

Every once in a while in any poker player’s life there will be times when it seems like you cannot win one pot for your life. Everytime you have bullets they seem to get cracked by some donkey playing 7-2 offsuit because they don’t know any better. You move all in late in the game short stacked with A-10 and get called by A-9 and you are thinking alright double up time!!!! Then the flop comes and you hit your 10 making the odds almost 100% in your favor and then they some how go runner runner to hit their straight, the only one they can hit that doesn’t give you something better. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!?!?!?!? WTF?!?!?!? The best part is you get to watch your bankroll that you worked hard to build start to disinegrate before your eyes and it seems that there really is nothing that you can do about it. You rack your brain going through your moves hand by hand attempting to find the flaw in your game and see nothing, but since this is a skill game I am not going to blame this on “bad luck”. We did not blame it on good luck when we made our bankroll, we are certainly not going blame bad luck for losing it. There must be some flaw in our game that we are not seeing, a tell we have developed, faulty logic, calculating odds based on feeling instead of actual facts and science, something must be wrong. Maybe we just get so used to winning we feel there is no other option which is a good mind set to have going in to a game or tourney but not if it makes us lazy outside the tables or makes us stop paying attention during the game. So what do we do? Generally we beat ourselves up and think about how much we suck at this game and how we have no business playing this game to begin with. However we did build our roll successfully so there must be something we do right we just need to get back to that. In my opinion the best thing to do at a time like this is read for starters, if you are not already. Pick up anything poker and just read, get back to learning all the time, always getting better. Then I usually drop to a lower limit game, so that as I stuggle to figure things out my bankroll does not deplete quite as quickly.