The Inebriated player
This is the way to get through your bankroll in short order.
I did it more times than I would care to admit in my first couple of years of playing until I realised that either I took the game seriously or stopped playing.
This type of player needs to realise a couple of things before they even contemplate wasting any more time reading this site:
The relationship between alcohol and playing the game of poker is fundamental to your understanding of what it takes to become a winning player and why being a good player requires more than just doing one or two things well. You need to do lots of things excellently to be a winning player.
Poker is a game of skill that involves luck. Or a game of luck that involves some skill depending on how you look at it.
I like to look at it as a complex game of skill that involves luck.
Once you take away the skill element then all you have is luck to rely on. Once you lose control of rational thinking then all good decision making has gone out of the window.
You play too many crap hands, you call too many raises with trash, you raise with junk for fun, you try bluffing with very marginal hands and it all ends up as any skill game should if you played it when you were drunk.
You start playing on a Friday night and begin putting away the Pop.
By late evening you have doubled or tripled your original $50 buy in to your chosen game.
Now everything starts to go wrong.
You start to feel like you can make moves that you wouldn’t normally try.
Because considered aggression wins by default you start to bully a few players with the occasional raise on the turn or river. So far so good.
You move up a limit with your extra bankroll.You feel confident enough to take a shot at the higher game.
But you’ve also now had four or five times the drink drive limit.
What happens now is a combination of playing against stronger players who can read the board far quicker than you and rapidly figure that you can’t have all these fantastic hands all the time.
Add to that the fact that you are playing totalled and you can’t defend yourself properly.
Later that evening you are reloading ……..
If you have a problem drinking and then playing poker you need to do the following:
1. Set yourself a maximum limit you can deposit on the sites you like to play on. This will stop you reloading on sites where this facility exists.
2. Give your credit card/deposit card to the missus / next door neighbour before you start playing so you can’t reload once you’ve lost.
3. Remove any stored credit card details on your poker site before you start playing again.
4. Record all the TV poker shows and store them up so you can watch them for entertainment. This is a good substitute for your poker fix.
You can't follow this system if you don't take it seriously. Poker is a hard enough game to win at without handicapping yourself by playing whilst playing under the effects of drink or drugs.
Someone who has been drinking is very, very easy to spot at the table.
The drunk player makes all in moves regularly, they reraise liberally, they showdown with absolutely nothing and in cash games they make massive bets and showdown with 23 offsuit.
The good player can spot this injured fish and rob him blind in minutes.
Now that we know the reasons why we are playing let’s take a look at bankroll management so that you never have to reload your poker account ever again.
Last update: 20-06-2008 12:46
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