People play poker for money

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It’s more than a way of keeping score. It’s the thing that gives the game meaning. As you know from your own experience, if you don’t play for money, you don’t take the game seriously, and you don’t make good decisions because, hue, who cares? So we play for money to en sure that our decisions have consequences. That’s what makes poker worthwhile. that’s what makes Poker poker.After a while, you build up a tolerance to money. Around the kitchen table of your youth, you could lose 6S cents in a game of anaconda and feel like the world had come to an end. Now you can endure swings of hundreds of dollars or more without batting an eye.

You’ve become more comfortable, over time, with playing for higher Stakes. The problem is, if you become too comfortable, you stop caring once again. Stakes that once made your heart race become, over time, so low that you can’t win or lose an amount that’s meaningful to you.

There’s no real incentive for playing well.

This is why high stakes players who come Slumming in low-limit games often play so poorly. The money doesn’t matter, so they don’t bother to bring their IL Ali game. Even if you’re a $6-$12 player and find yourself in a $2-$4 game while waiting for a seat in $6-$12, you may not be playing your best. This is, of course, ridiculous.

The trick, then, is finding the right money level for your comfort. You want the money to matter enough to focus your attention-but then again not to matter so much that you end up playing scared. Why? Because if you’re scared, you play differently.

Outside your comfort zone, things quickly fall apart. Example: you’ve been kicking it at the $4-$8 level, and you decide to take a shot at (oh, let’s be outrageously brave here) $20-$40. Maybe you’ve never played $20-$40 before; maybe you have.

In any case, you don’t play this game reg-ularly, and it does not escape your attention that a single hand at this limit can net-or cost-you more than an entire session at $4-$8. You tell yourself not to be scared.

Maybe you aren’t even scared-but you’re a little uncom¬fortable. Admit it, you are. No problem, you tell yourself: Just screw down your starting requirements, pay attention, play quality cards, concentrate, and you’ll do just fine. Then this hand corns up: you’re in late position with A-Q suited. Ifs folded around to you, and you figure this is a perfect opportunity to assault the blinds, so you plunk down a raise.

The button and the small blind fold. Perfect! You wouldn’t mind stealing the blinds here. It would do wonders for your comfort. Alas, the big blind calls. He eyes you curiously as he does so. Does he recognize you as a newbie? Does he know that you’re outside your comfort zone? Maybe, Maybe not. He does know this for sure: You’re Not a regular, because he’s a regular, and he’s never seen you before.
Unfortunately for you, he has a program bet (a predeter-mined betting sequence or strategy) that he uses on players he’s never seen before.

What he does is, he check-calls any flop, then check-raises any tam. He can do this because he’s comfortable at this limit, and if the gambit doesn’t work, he won’t miss the chips-especially when he considers how much information about (and dominance over) you he stands to collect.

So this is what he does to you, and unless you flop a monster, his program bet will put you in a bad place. If you fold now, you look weak, passive, and exploit¬able. If you raise back, or even call, you’re committing a lot more money than you’re used to committing on any single bet. Trapped thus between Scylla and Charybdis, you throw your hand away.

Better that than your money, right?

Just to cheek se you off (for this is part of his program-bet strategy) your opponent shows you the rags with which he bluffed you out. Now you feel hot, embarrassed, and ridicu¬lous. Where does your session go from here? Into free fall, and thence, if you’re not careful, into the toilet.

The next hand you pick up is A-K suited, but you’re afraid to raise with it, afraid to leave yourself open to the same sort of attack you just endured. So you flat-call in¬stead, hoping to flop big and become the trapper instead of the Trappe.

The flop corns’ 9-x-x and your now-nemesis bets right out. Does he have a nine? He easily could, given that you didn’t raise him off any moderate small blind holding pre-flop. You’ve got over cards, so you call. You call again on the team.

By the time the river cones down, you’re looking at a ragged board with no ace and no king, and your only hope of winning the hand is if your opponent is on a stone bluff. He checks, inducing you to bet, which you do because you’re damned if you’re going to show fear….

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