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EPT San Remo and future of poker

Another EPT another day 1 bust out. I was down to 3k chips in the first level after the following hand occurred:

I raised 150 from early position with AA and got called by middle position and button. The flop came T 5 7 with 1 heart and I bet 400, both players called. The turn was a 2 of hearts, again I bet, this time 1300. MP folded and Button called. River was a JH which is a pretty bad card for me, but nevertheless, I decided to value bet 3k since I know the player and think he's calling with a lot of worse hands, so I bet 3k (I probably should have bet a little bit less in hindsight). He just called and tabled 69hh for the flush.

After this hand, I managed to lose even more chips by raising hands like AQ and middle pocket pairs, getting re-raised and having to fold. I'm determined not to get my chips in bad and to take coinflips only when necessary, especially with the level of play I saw in San Remo. I then made a few aggressive resteals, got back up to 5k at 50/100 and then doubled with aces vs. top pair. I get to about 14k and then lose with AA vs KJ in an uninteresting 8k all in preflop pot, so now I'm down to 10k. So I remain patient until 150/300 where the most beautiful situation occurs; I have 10k chips on the small blind, middle position makes it 900, guy next to him calls, another caller and yet another caller. So now there's about 4000 in the pot and I look down at AKo, squuuuuuueeze. Usually in these situations when I shove everyone either folds or 1 person calls and even if one person calls with a pair theres so much dead money in the pot so it's definitley worth taking a flip. Everyone folded until the last guy who called with pocket 9's and I lost the flip so that was GG for me.

San Remo was definitley not so good for my prop bet. It's very difficult to have any meal without pizza, spaghetti or unhealthy carbs. I've never seen so many pizza restaurants in such close proximity in my life. I think I racked up about 6k in penalties in Italy alone. I was shocked to see that despite this, I still ended up losing 3 kilo's that week and now resting at a solid 92 Kilo's. So I've lost 6 Kilos and am half way to my goal of 86 Kilos.

You know, I've never been certain about how profitable poker will be in the future (10-20 years from now) until playing some blackjack in Italy and Europe in general. Blackjack you say? What does that have to do with poker? Allow me to explain-- I've always been paranoid about how in the next few years everyone will learn how to play more profitably and the skill level of players will even out and therefore make it a lot more difficult to win or at least make luck a much bigger factor. This is no longer the case, I now think that poker will ALWAYS be profitable. I was a little bored after I busted out of San Remo and was waiting for my Sit and Go to start so I decided to sit down kill some time and play a little blackjack. Blackjack is one of the most simple forms of gambling there is and even if you're not familiar with the game you can easily get a strategy card that tells you when to hit, stay, double and split. If you follow this strategy the house has less than a 1% edge, 0.62% in European blackjack and 0.28% in Vegas to be exact. Wherever I go in Europe, I'm always shocked to see how terrible people are at following basic strategy in blackjack. People do crazy things like stay with 13-16 with the dealers 10 showing and don't make obvious doubles if "they have a feeling". How could you possibly say you have a feeling in blackjack when theres 8 decks shuffled in an automatic shuffler? Superstition is a terrible attribute to have as a poker player or a gambler. I'm not a math guy, but I think the house edge increases substantially when people play as bad as they do. The worst thing is, when you play properly (take a card when you're suppose to take a card for instance) people are shocked and if the outcome/result changes for the worse people get genuinely angry at you. Another thing I've noticed is that when the dealer is showing an ace everyone rushes in to pay insurance. For those of you that don't know, insurance is a sucker bet and just another way for the casino to obtain more of an edge.

Now my theory regarding the future of profitability in poker is that if the majority of people who gamble don't understand or are not willing to learn how to play a simple game like blackjack properly then how on earth will they ever understand or get good at the complex game of poker? It's because of human nature that poker will always be profitable; destructive characteristics including ego, stubbornness, ignorance, and superstition that are likely to cause the downfall of any poker player. Poker is the perfect way to legally steal from the rich and give to the poor :)

13 April 2008 / About Imper1um

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