I usually wait to sit at my starting table until it’s about half full. Then I sit and start to listen to the conversations… Who’s got recent bad beat stories? Who’s running well? Who’s not really even focused on playing today? I play at tables where I am usually the only female and the vibe of females is usually pretty stereotypical. Unless I prove otherwise early in the tournament, they expect me to play like the tight-weak female players they are used to at this particular card room. This works to my advantage because I can manipulate that stereotype early on in the tournament and then change gears to throw them off later.
The card room where I play my weekly Saturday tournaments has a lot of loose aggressive gambler-type players. This is a dog track. The guys playing here are usually placing bets on the dogs while they’re raising hands. Starting off as a tight-aggressive player works well because they see me as someone in there raising with the nuts or at least an Ace, for the most part. I can usually take down a lot of small pots early on to keep myself with a healthy stack. My aggressive raising; though, is usually backed by semi-bluffs.
However, sometimes, such as in today’s session, the cards really do not help my early tournament game. Cards are supposed to be only 30% of poker, according to Helmuth and other pros.. but this was tough today. My table image started to become a reality. I did enter a few pots and played them aggressively to take them down but the semi-bluff backers were hard to come by. I honestly, didn’t catch an Ace-anything until the third level. My best pocket hands consisted of Q7, K9.. all off suit. With a lot of raising it was hard to make a play with something like this. I kept telling myself something better will come along… even if it’s a low pocket pair. Unfortunately, it just never did. Not only were my starting hands not giving me anything to work with, but I just never really connected with the flop either.
Enough with the whoa-is-me attitude. Cards shouldn’t matter all that much so where did I go wrong here? (I ended up playing a short stack for most of the tournament until my 10’s went up against K’s.) I’m thinking that because I wasn’t getting cards to work with maybe I should have changed my table image when things were not working out as planned. I could have presented myself as a loose-aggressive player and either hope to catch or just use my reading skills to know when I could steal. I usually don’t become a loose-aggressive player unless I have a comfortable chip lead or feel table control. . That’s an image I will have to explore in my early game and see if I can pull it off when I’m feeling myself becoming the stereotype image.
