In the last three weeks, I have spent a lot of time watching my girlfriend Michelle play ‘The Endgame’. She also grinds the 45 player SNGs but mostly keeps to the $10 buy-ins. She ended last month with some bad variance. It was pretty standard stuff – the bad-beats, the coolers, the lost coin-flips in that crucial period just before the final tables but as the downswing extended into the first few days of September, she became convinced that something was awry in her game. So I watched her play – usually keeping an eye on her games from 15 players to go – and I noticed that she had developed two leaks.
The first was to do with making standard raises when she has 10BBs instead of just pushing all-in. The second (and possibly linked to the first) was her general lack of aggression. It was as if she had become a little gun-shy, giving opponents what I thought was too much credit and failing to loosen up sufficiently late on. She desperately wanted to make the final table and then when she got there, she desperately wanted to just make the money. The problem was her game had become too passive, too fearful and this was costing her a lot of chips in the period between 12 and 10 left when you are 5-6 handed and you have to go into attack mode.
It was a peculiar anomaly. In my experience with most players, a bad run makes them overly aggressive. They start forcing things, making too many moves and marginal calls. With Michelle, it made her scared. So, over the course of the next few nights, I re-enforced a few key endgame principles, argued occasionally over the merits of some plays (I am, for the most part, more aggressive than Michelle) and helped my lady get back on track. The main thing was that she started raising a wider range from the cut-off and button and started punishing limpers by being willing to shove her stack with any 2 cards as long as she had good fold equity. She became fearless again and that is a must for a good poker player. You have to be willing to donk the occasional tourney. You have to be willing to lose.
It’s like taking the 5 Euro Ryanair flight instead of the 80 Euro Aerlingus one. You take your seat knowing there is risk involved but in the end, whether you make it to your desired destination or are left standing on the tarmac in Beauvais waiting for the bomb squad to arrive (A story I will return to in a future blog), you will be richer for it.
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