As promised

Tying up the loose ends...

Let's start with the steroid policy. People are way too happy about this. Ok, great, steroids aren't going to be in the game, you know it's going to be all natural. That, I won't argue, is good. What's bad, is that this is all a public relations scam. That's right, I said it. A public relations scam.

Until Major League Baseball and the MLBPA convene and determine a safe list of supplements, a safe list of over the counter medicines for illnesses - this is a scam. Players can lose a third of a season because they took a cold medicine that they had no idea contained a banned substance.


Now, with the poker.

I have discovered that in poker you can make the wrong play for the right reasons and the right play for the wrong reasons. I have no idea if my play was correct or incorrect. I still think that there are very compelling arguments for calling and equally compelling arguments for folding. I've been having those arguments for a week now.

Some of the reasons you can make the wrong play for the right reasons are usually mathematically related. You miscalculate your pot odds or implied odds. You put your opponent on a correct range of hands, but you miscalculate your equity against those hands. Those sorts of things.

You can make the right play for the wrong reasons for, largely, the psychological aspects. You're getting anxious, you act without thinking, you miss a key element of your opponent's play.

Here, I made a couple of errors. First, taking the time to do the math, I was only getting about 4.5-1 implied odds. Had I put my implied odds at 4.5-1 instead of 5-1, I may well have folded. There is no doubt in my mind that I made this play out of anxiousness. I was very antsy because I'd gone cold carded for several orbits, which had eaten almost half of my stack away. While on the one hand clearly something needed to be done, I was not in the proper position to raise with a hand like 97s.

Even though my opponent flipped over aces, I think my range of hands was accurate. AA-JJ, AK, AQs were all reasonable holdings for my opponent. I put him on a looser range than normal as the player doubled through me when I LP raised with 9Ts and he woke up with Kings.

I clearly made errors in the decision making process, but I'm not sure if those errors led me to make the wrong play or merely were responsible for having me make the correct play with faulty logic. If you have any thoughts, feel free to weigh in.