Hatch Poker Remedials

Right after we finished watching Million Dollar Baby last night, I started playing in the 9pm cst Freeroll on Poker.com. During the movie they talked about retraining a boxer from the ground up, so the fighter knows how to react to a situation without thinking about it. This is not actually just movie mumbo-jumbo, it applies to many things in life. When I was in the marching band in high school, we spent hours high-stepping or low-stepping up and down the field, so much so that for a long time afterwards I still took 8 steps to go 5 yards. I played so many scales on the tuba that I the finger positions are locked into muscle memory and I can repeat them right now on my air tuba even though I haven't touched one since Christmas Day in 1986 after I got back from the Sun Bowl.

Unfortunately, I haven't reached that point in Texas Hold'em yet. In last night's tournament, level 4 had just started and I had yet to play a hand besides the big blind I had paid once by this point. I was getting impatient, so when I finally got dealt my first Ace of the night, along with an offsuit 6, I pushed all my chips in from UTG+2 after UTG and UTG+1 had both called in front of me. My brain knew at some level that this was wrong. The table was playing loose and there had been no folding around going on.

So of course the person next to me calls, plus the two in front of me. The first two guys had crap like K5, which was only slightly worse than the A6o crap I pushed in with. The person after me however, showed pocket Aces. Fortunately, I had 40 more chips than he did, so I wasn't completely busted out of the tournament yet. I doubled up twice on the next two hands, then ate a round of blinds before I pushed in with K9h and got bounced out with an Ace high in about 980th place.

So I've still got a lot of work to do on my patience and automatically folding in certain situations. There was no reason for me to even call in that situation, much less put all my chips in. Folding in that situation should have been decided as quickly as I can tell you 6x9=54. Maybe I need to make some flash cards.