Loosing the cool - bye bye strategy

As a newbie, i'm still on a (sometimes steep) learning curve. Thought i'd share an experience and check if others have similar experiences.

Tournament, about 1500 people playing reasonably (big money winnings, so not many players going kaboom on crap hands). I start out playing rock solid. Only get a few small blinds but keeps my spot and maintains the stack although not growing it for the first hour.

About 20 mins into second hour i catch a hand and luckily am able to knock a solid dent in a couple of opponents and triple my stack. Holds that for another 15 mins then gets another couple of chances which i use to get into a solid chip position (among the top 30 at about 14k).

Bump, win and wooble along for a while till i get the chance to make something again. Gets a good win and am now among the top ten with about 28k chips.

In the third hour of the game, an opponent (X) grabs a few pots from me going hard in after the flop. I play them solid and fold since i havent got the nuts. He still leaves me with a feeling that he has nicked my chips...

After 20 mins i'm right hand to dealer and X is on BB. He doubles the blinds bet and another player and me follow him in. I have AQ suited. Flop comes showing 10 8 5, one in my colour but not impressive. He checks, I raise, the third guy folds and X re-raises. I'm thinking bullshit and that guy X aint stealing more pots off of me, so I give it another whirl and we end up all in. He has 10 10 pockets...

My lesson: Dont EVER forget your strategy. Dont get suckered into bets by aggrevation, stupid reliance in hand cards or plain stupidity. ALWAYS evaluate your hand against whats on the table and calculate what the possible hands are and what your chances are against those hands.

Am I about right in my evaluation here? Does anyone recognice this pattern??

Biggest tournament ive been in so far and i'm not entirely dissatisfied. I'm very new at this and does actually win here and there. Havent spent any money of my own on this poker interest yet, but hopefully ill reach a stage where i can put some money into this and start winning some.

Indeed, if you are going to push you want to really have some outs. If you had kept playing a bit tighter who knows.

You gotta stick to your strategy no matter how much other players piss you off, it is worse to be out than to just wait for the right time to bust them.

Cranck you fell into a classic trap, he got you thinking he was overplaying and when his homerun hand fell you paid him off. Classic advanced poker strategy. Assuming he was thinking that and wasn't just overly aggressive and got lucky. I try to make sure I hit players like that with a big reraise early keeps them honest, they are likely to respect your play more, and only play legitimate hands.

I have kicked the wall many times for paying someone off and letting them get to me and get me to play wrong all it has gotten me is a sore foot.

For online play strategy is hard to keep with all the noobs that play n jus want to get all in to double up.

I bet the foot has healed by now....how about the wall though?

Cranc, sound like you were going along well and then went all-in on Ace high. I think your after-play analysis is correct. A player such as you have mentioned could have had any number of starting hands including a pocket pair as low as dueces...in this situation, you have got to ask yourself, what hands can i beat?

Ace high is not going to beat many hands in that situation.

If he was a a pusher I would of called too

The problem is once you see a great flop sometimes i tend to forget what else others might have. So i usually bust out with a set against a straight or a flush.

Its an easy trap to fall into. I have done it a few times. Just cos some guy has raised all-in a few times and got real lucky with 4 4 or 7 7, just stay away from him, someone will eventaully knock the guy out............literally hopefully