327 WORDS / 2 MIN READ / ORIGINALLY POSTED JUNE 1, 2015 (EDITED)
My Poker Coach George “The Engineer” Epstein talks about me for the second time in his weekly column in Gaming Today, a newspaper devoted to casinos and sports betting. The column is a little confusing— I think he may have misunderstood some of the things I was trying to explain to him when we discussed these topics, but here’s the link anyway for those interested (link updated 2ix2022 by X):
https://www.gamingtoday.com/news/recognize-poker-mistakes-and-learn-from-them/
To understand this post, you’ll need to know some poker terms: (1) In a tournament, competitors are randomly grouped nine or ten to a table, so if there are, say, 44 entrants, the tournament starts with five tables, and as players “bust out” (are eliminated), tables are consolidated until at the end there’s just one table, the “final table;” (2) the “bubble” is the situation when just one more player has to bust out to leave all the remaining players in the money, so when I “busted out on the bubble,” which in fact I did, that means I was eliminated one place away from the prize money; in my particular case, places first through sixth “cashed” (won some money), while I came in seventh. Bummer.
Along the way, I busted four players— two at my first table and two at my second, and a serious poker “leak” (a weakness or game-playing defect) presented itself: I learned I do not enjoy busting opponents. I feel bad for the other guy when I do. There’s only one other person I know who has this problem, an Indonesian silat practitioner who dropped out of karate competition because “he felt pity when someone lost to him.” It’s the same leak, and it has to be addressed if I’m to make any progress. Thinking maybe “sports psychologist?”
And for those who asked, here’s the link to the column in which George mentions me for the first time as mentioned in a previous post (link updated 8viii2022 by X):
https://www.gamingtoday.com/news/player-x-gets-an-a-in-poker-strategy-knowhow/