Pain For Sale-Playing Too Many Starting Hands
Keeping My Head Above Water
Here's your business-class ticket to cool, with complimentary mojo after takeoff.
When your poker game crashes, this is the black box. One day, they’ll make the whole game out of that stuff.
Build your game on POW—pearls of wisdom from the best damn poker blog around.
The best things in life aren’t things. They’re people who write free advice on how to win at poker—a game of money played with cards, not the other way around.
Pain For Sale — Don’t treat paper like plastic. Cash games aren’t tournaments.
PAPER: The longest journey begins with... a cash advance from Bank of America.
PLASTIC: “Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy chips—which is kinda the same thing.”
The sex of poker is really a game of mistakes. The biggest one? Pleasure. That fine line between success and self-destruction lives in one dirty (Harry) question:
“Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”
Poker is situational. Winning poker is about making good decisions. Feeling lucky and hitting the casino is like feeling athletic and going to a sports bar. It’s a bad call. It’s a voluntary madness—the psycho path.
In blackjack, there’s always a right move. Not so with No Limit Hold’em. It’s a game of inference under uncertainty. You’re not just solving puzzles—you’re reading people. And people are unpredictable.
No Limit Hold’em (NLH) has a high luck coefficient. It encourages pathological optimism. Feeling lucky is almost the right way to play—but only almost.
The difference between “almost right” and “right” is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Luck is thunder. It’s loud, impressive—but lightning does the work. And lightning doesn’t strike twice because the same place is never there anymore.
The sex of poker, then, can be misery. It no longer loves company—it demands it. Luck teaches backwards. Test first. Lesson later. It’s your university. Chips? Your report card.
Yes, it's naive not to believe in luck—but luck doesn’t always believe in you. Luck is a loan shark. It lends, but it never gives. And when you buy in with nothing but “lucky,” there’s plenty of pain for sale.
If pain is weakness leaving the body, then poker pain is weakness leaving your game. Not acquired—tuned in to. The poker frequency. Do you play infrequently? Is that one word or two?
In a standard $2-$4 NL game, playing too many starting hands is weakness. Your VPIP should be 20–30%. That means folding AJ under the gun, KT from the cutoff, QT on the button. Just saying no won’t fix bad play, but saying yes to everything guarantees it.
A jackass who persists in recklessness may eventually become a smart ass.
The lesson? Poker isn’t just a game. It’s a mirror. And the reflection isn’t always flattering. But if you stare long enough, you’ll start to see the edges sharpen—and your game evolve.