Dan's Diary
Each issue we follow the exploits of young Dan Gordon, as he embarks on his quest to find fame and fortune on the professional poker circuit. In this excerpt from his diaries, Dan overcomes a streak of supernatural bad luck to qualify for the 5 Diamond Classic.
Poker is just your basic game of math. Aces beat Kings about 83 percent of the time and A-K suited beats 7-2 off suit about 70 percent of the time. Sounds like a simple game, right? Just figure out when your hand is a big favorite against the other person’s hand and get all the chips in the middle of the pot. Oh, if only it was that easy.
Now, I could fill this entire magazine with bad beat stories, but that would only serve to depress me, and I am sure that my readers don’t want to hear a whole catalogue misfortune. But I will tell you about the situation hurting me the most (and by “me” I mean my bankroll). It’s when I’m in hands involving an all-in showdown. I have been losing about 20% of the time when I should be losing around 5%, and in hands where I should be winning 60% of the time, I’m losing about 70%. That may not sound so bad to you, but a) You aren’t backing me, and b) when you realize how many times this situation has come up in the last few months, it becomes staggering.
Needless to say, this has been a difficult time. I’ve
always heard about
the bad runs that every good player goes through, but
I never realized how bad they could actually be. It’s
a pretty helpless feeling when I am playing my best
poker and the most common result is trapping people
into outdrawing me. To steal my favorite line in television
history, “On a scale of 1 to 10, it sucked.”
To make matters worse, it has not only been a low point
in my poker career, but in my life in general. I’ve
been grouchy and whiny and handling it exactly how I
am not supposed to. It’s like I’m into tilt
mode when I wake up at night, and feeling even
worse when I go to bed in the afternoon. I’ve
done my best to keep this from affecting my play, but
there is only so much a guy can take.
I think the most difficult thing for me to figure out was why I was getting outdrawn constantly, and could never do unto others as they had done to me. I was very close to the end of an ultrashort career as a professional poker player when it hit me. I realized that one of the reasons I was getting outdrawn was because I keep getting people to put all of their chips in the pot while they hold the worst hand. In other words, I am not outdrawing people because I can’t. I already have the best hand going in, and therefore it is impossible to improve.
Coming to that realization helped prepare me mentally for accepting bad luck and bad beats. Granted, I’m still losing more of these hands, percentage-wise, than I should be, but I’m sure that will change. I just hope I’m still around to see it, as the meager bankroll I came out here with is quickly disappearing due to a lack of decent wins.
