Thank Goodness For The Donks

Man, I am playing terrible tonight. Fortunately I have the good sense to be bailing after not too long a session. Just can not focus, calling every three bet and constantly overcalling with hands that would barely be good enough to open with. Just full-on autopilot, not really thinking through anything preflop (even as I write this I have one table open and I just opened with 84s on the button and called the 3-bet).

It is strange to me how I never seem to go on autopilot postflop, although I did make one horrible sort of misclick. I had flopped bottom two in a multiway pot. Fired flop and turn and was c/c'd. River paired the king (which had been high card on the flop), which made my hand near useless. Villain, who stank, made a big bet and I called before focussing on what the river had been. WTF? Might be good to check the board before choosing an action. Turns out he had flopped top two and filled up on the river, so I was drawing extremely thin the whole time. But the river obviously should have saved me money.

Plays like that really make me wonder how it is I make money at poker. And it's obvious. As bad as I am, there are some REALLY bad players out there. In fact, despite all the hand-wringing on certain forums about the toughening of the games, it seems to me like the REALLY bad players are in abundance. They play bad enough to make up for the money I spew to the regs (and sometimes even spew back to the donks), and to make up for the times they suck out, and to make up for the endless stream of rake that's siphoned off all our stacks.

This is all obvious, of course, but I'm just thinking about it tonight because I played about as bad as I'm able but still broke even, thanks mainly to one donk who shoved his full stack anytime he had ANY pair. I stacked him a couple times with marginal hands. Of course, if he had turned or rivered 2p or trips my bottom line's different. But that stuff balances out. In the main, this guy is going to constantly get it in bad. And when he's done, there's someone else coming up behind him to the same thing.

When this particular guy left, I noticed a couple of the reg's instaquit the table. Which kind of surprised me, because, hey, I was still there. I really thought that. Which made me realize I have poor poker self-esteem. If I try to really articulate reasons I think I have an edge in the game, it's very difficult (except to criticize the extreme donks). Articulating my leaks, conversely, comes very easy. Hopefully it's part of whatever success I've had, the fact that I generally think of myself as a lucky fish who manages to get paid off by the worse players more than I do the same for the better players. I don't think it affects my play negatively at all. Indecision or self-doubt are not issues for me at the table. Sometimes I look at my results and allow myself the thought that I couldn't be up over this many hands without some skills. But my main thought on that front is more like, 'if I'm making some cash from this game now, with all my grievous leaks, imagine what it's going to be like when I plug 'em up a bit'. Okay, plug 'em up a lot.