I’ve been too busy to do more than just play casual poker over the past few days. Today was the exception, and I played in the Bodog $500 Freeroll. The key story here was that I hit an unbelievable number of bad beats in a row. I had an ace high straight beat by a flush and triple 4s beat by triple 10s.
What really lost me the tournament, however was some major money hands where I played decent pot odds that didn’t pay. I think I had a couple of straight draws and a flush draw where I was drawn in with the very edge of good odds… 4 to 1 or so. Four to one pot odds with a $200 bet can pay off big, but a few of those in a row that fail to pay off and you are looking at a dwindling stack. That’s what happened to me.
I’m thinking that I may start to err on the side of caution in the future. Some people stretch pot odds to account for various implied pot odds–people betting later, etc. But I’m finding that, at least in the short term, I may need to look at it from the opposite direction. Perhaps I’m not accounting for dead outs or I’m discounting other things. We’ll see. I can say this, however, my play will be a bit more conservative in the future in this regard.