Online poker is a very interesting animal when you think about it. Before the internet and the growth of the game and medium we love if you were to become a great player you were either born with the ability or you started early, and played in everything you could (mostly a lot of home games and underground stuff till you could get to the casinos) and then went from there. With the advent of the the online game the learning curve has been given an afterburner setting. While I think that is great and as long as you are willing to leverage the opportunity and put in the time you can escalate your learning and make substantial progress quickly, but there is another side to remember. Poker is about exploiting mistakes and minimizing your own, but remember mistakes cost money. Why am I lamenting on this today, last night I was working on playing some more cash to develop my post flop play and reading abilities. They have come a long way and playing cash is now much more enjoyable as I don't feel like a speedbump on the way for someone to stack me. It is a unique challenge to play that deep and to try to get someone to stack off to you and being able to read and understand their ranges and tendencies goes a long way in this arena. Anyway back to the theme, so after I stacked off huge at .50/1.00 AA to a set of 4's I was gracefully reminded that knowledge comes with a price and in the poker world that price is money. What struck me the most interesting is that by then end of the night the loss was gone, it had been recovered and as far as my bankroll was concerned it never happened, but thankfully the lesson was there. It stuck in my mind. The thought of dropping $100 on a single hand was seering into my brain. I spent some time this morning looking back over the hand. What did I miss? What did I not see? Did I misread him? Did I overplay my hand, was I too aggressive with an overpair on a dry flop with low cards? Was my pre-flop line correct? I can say that I spend a good amount of time analyzing my tournament play and that I analyze hands that I loose for big pots, but there is something about dropping live cash into someone elses pocket that just jumpstarts your brain into asking a zillion more detailed questions. So end conclusion on this one, the learning curve moves faster and it can cost a lot more, but I think it is worth it. The pain of one bad had and the immediate loss of tangeble dollars resulted in more deep analysis than anything short of a FT bubble bustout. This is the Gman signing out. May all your flushes be royal!
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