Guest Post – Drizztdj – Chatting for Profit

Posted by AlCantHang | Filed under Bloggers on the Rail

The Battle of the Blogger Tournaments 4 started up this weekend with a great showing. Bloggers/readers and a few big name online pros made their appearance in the first few events. These are not your average smaller buyin events, the play is a little tougher than you would expect at these levels. Not unexpected with thousands of dollars in added prizes on the line and 7 WSoP seats.

You will also find some very interesting banter in the chat as a lot of players have seen each other over the course of play and sometimes it gets a little heated. When that happens you need to know how to use it to your benefit.

Funnyman/blogger Drizztdj brings us a primer on that very subject. Stop back later in the week for a roundup of the week’s action as well as Michael Craig responding to the Julius_Goatttt Challenge.

Chatting For Profit
by Drizztdj

You’re a busy person.

Work, kids, school, A-Rod Fan Club President, professional poker player, needs to get a haircut. In the mist of getting twenty-five things done at once, you find the time to sit down at your favorite laptop , PC, or MAC and decide to fire up a few tournament tables here at Full Tilt. With that extra block of time you choose a couple of MTTs with fat guarantees and settle into your chair with a favorite beverage or eight sitting to your right.

Motoring along in the second hour of the $27,500 guarantee $26 token tourney, you find yourself with double the starting stack but under par and getting your blinds picked off by the big stacks as the antes kick in. The money spots won’t hit until the third or fourth hour and barring the dealer gifting you some big pocket pairs soon, you’ll need to pick a spot to gamble. After a tug off your Captain and Coke (or insert favorite drink here as I’m biased towards the spiced rum) and holding only seven big blinds you’re dealt 8s-9s in the big blind. Folded around to the aggressive big stack that has been using your blinds as his personal ATM for the past half hour, he min-raises again from middle position getting the rest of the table to flip over to CNN for the latest on Obama’s stimulus plans. Being in a spot to hopefully get two live cards in for a gamble and maybe net his chips in the middle, you shove over the top of his fourth straight raise pre-flop and are sadly met by a snap call with red aces.

“Oh well, gg folks!” you type into the chat box as there’s a decision to be made on one of the other tables and your focus heads to another screen. Flop comes down Ts-4h-Js, and suddenly those pocket fives on the other table don’t seem very exciting as you just flopped an open ended straight flush draw. A pulse in your seemingly dead tournament life, you cheer for those 15 outs twice waking up the wife in the process but will deal with her wraith later, live outs baby!

2s falls on the turn and you offer an “unlucky” in the chat box to your opponent’s crushed pocket rockets, suddenly you have chips again and a new outlook toward snagging that $4,000+ first prize. Poker is fun! But, wait, what’s this?

“U r a f in dkey, looser ROFL omg idiot!!11” come from the rock avatar as his once mountain of chips went from Mount Everest to K-2, after you managed a few snowflakes off the peak of his stack. Being a calm player, you offer another condolence for the cracked aces, but are careful not to educate the irate player as to why you made the move.

Unfortunately, this happens with any successful run to the final table of a lengthy MTT. Somewhere along the line, you found two cards to gamble your short stack/beginning stack with and hit a flush, a set, or snared that dominated kicker on the river. Its poker, best hand does not always win, the sooner you learn that lesson, the more likely you will keep your wits when the above situation happens and not end up throwing a laptop or berating a play that made perfect sense if you were in his shoes with the cracked aces.

Some people thrive on anger and turn their aggression into a pile of blinds, antes, and continuation bets being shipped towards their stack. But, playing optimum poker is best done when you are able to analyze the situation quickly and make the best positive expectation play. Letting someone’s comments in the chat box get to that Zen-like calm can mean spewing chips, buy-ins, and cheating yourself out of a potential three, four, five, or six figure score just because you couldn’t handle being called a poorly typed name.

Now there’s a couple of ways to go about releasing the tension from the poor sport in the five seat:

1. Battle of words
2. Silent treatment

Choosing to face the mouth breather to a battle of wits in the chat box can be effective as long as you don’t stoop to his level. Coming up with mama/sister jokes and using a plethora of poor poker playing adjectives might tilt the other player into a bad play, but most likely have the reverse effect as you look up your next witty one-liner on Google.

The better decision is the silent treatment. No one likes to be ignored and thanks to the wonders of technology, here at Full Tilt you can simply right click on the ball of rage’s avatar and choose to block their chat. Or if you prefer, just read along with every insult about your car being able to fit inside a chihuahua’s dog house and laugh with it instead of feeling the need to press your intellectual superiority.

Check raises, floats, and stop-and-gos are not the only weapons you can use at the table to win. Using your head and staying calm while others make bad decisions based on an inability to accept a suckout, can take you from being a break-even player to a profitable one!

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