As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, we recently moved into a new house. It’s been about five weeks now that we’ve lived there. With a brand new house comes an empty lot filled with flattened soil where the lawn is supposed to be, so one of our jobs after moving in was to buy grass and put it there. There are two options, either buy grass seeds and plant them ourselves (cheap) or buy ready-grown grass on rolls and just put the rolls down (convenient). We chose the rolls because we’d like to be able to use the lawn this summer.

Now, regardless of methodology, you end up with a future lawn that needs a LOT of water. We’re talking three hours of watering every night. There’s no point in watering during the day since the grass first of all needs the sunlight anyway, and secondly the water mostly evaporates if you water when the sun is shining directly on it. The water needs to sink down into the ground properly.

There’s a reason I’m telling you this. I’m getting there.

Our lawn is divided into three segments, I guess you could say. There’s the front side, the side-side, and the back side. We only have one faucet to connect the hose to, so we can only water one of the three bits at a time. As I said, the grass needs to be watered for about three hours per day, so some quick arithmetics give that these three parts make for a total of 9 hours of watering per day. And it has to be done out of sunlight.

You’re starting to see our dilemma, perhaps. Now, what we do is that we water the front side after 5pm, when that part of the lawn is in the shade of the house. Then after that we move the sprinkler to the side of the house, and then after sunset we move to the back of the house. If we start watering at 5pm, we can turn the water off around midnight.

So, armed with this knowledge of how our lawn-watering schedule was set-up, you’ll now understand why I was still up at 1am on Saturday night despite having nothing to do except to wait for the three hour mark on my watch to come around so I could turn off the water. We didn’t have anything planned for Saturday night, so we mostly just sat around; I played a chunk of poker (mostly $3/$6 with a 45-seater tournament thrown in that I miraculously won) and ended the day up about $500.

Or so I thought.

Because as I was sitting off the remaining 30 minutes, I found one of my favorite opponents sitting at a $5/$10 table with a seat open. Easy money. I couldn’t resist the urge to play him and I figured I had to do something for the remaining 30 minutes anyway. I sat down.

And the awfulness that has marked the past two months of $5/$10 just kept repeating itself. I got absolutely no action on my monsters, and I lost huge pots when I ended up with KK vs AA, set vs. set and not the least when my flush card on the river gave my opponent a full house. These don’t technically qualify as “bad beats” if you live by the standard of “who has the best hand when the money goes in” but when you find yourself very often on one side of this coin and very rarely on the other, it will create a huge downswing. The past two months have been like this for me.

So 200 hands later (about 45 minutes) and I’m down $600. My heart sinks in my chest. I had now actually passed the 400BB mark in my downswing at 5/10, a line that I never thought I’d cross. I couldn’t believe it. I sat out to turn the water off and made the choice to stay at the table for as long as the really bad player stayed, at least. Bad luck like this couldn’t keep going.

20 minutes later, I was down $940 for the night. I was almost in shock. I knew I was playing well - probably not my very topmost game, but definitely well enough to crush this particular table - but the cards had it in for me. I was about to get up and just leave, but…

… But I didn’t. I decided that I did not want to end yet another night of $5/$10 desperately down, because I didn’t want to be depressed about how far I had fallen for the rest of the weekend. I stayed.

That’s a recipe for disaster, isn’t it? Late at night, stuck almost 100 BBs, desperately trying to get unstuck? It is. And I wouldn’t recommend anyone else do it, and I’m pretty sure I won’t do it again myself. But I played until 6:30 in the morning, ending the night of $5/$10 at -$250, which is of course a vast improvement.

In the midst of this four-tabling (I moved up to four tables to help speed up my recovering from the losses, go figure) madness in the middle of the night I came to the sleepy realization that I seem to actually play better when I play four tables than when I play just one or two. I felt like I made better decisions on auto-pilot than when I was thinking them through.

I wondered why.

Then I realized that I have a tendency to overthink things. This is where my Fancy Play Syndrome comes from. I “think” that I can get someone to fold queen-high, but they don’t and I end up bluffing a calling station.

I “think” that this guy is gutsy enough to bluff the river, so I call down with ace-high.

Etc.

The problem is the level of thinking that I’m employing. I should either be thinking more (or at least better) or I should be thinking less. My default play is good enough to beat these games. My a-game is definitely enough to crush them. But I shouldn’t be making half-assed plays based on half-assed thinking. It’s either/or in this case.

But in realizing this, I also started thinking about how I can beat some of my most common opponents, specifically the regulars at $5/$10. I immediately recognize half the table when I sit down (and usually have notes on four out of five) and I realize that there’s probably a lot to be gained from getting very specific notes on these guys, and for me to develop a very specific strategy on how to beat them, one by one. So that’s my next job.

I’ll be posting my thoughts on these guys (not by name though), their styles and my thinking on how best can exploit their weaknesses. I hope it could be an interesting read.