:The Know-It-All Blog

It’s often been said that the best advice one can heed is one’s own, and certainly in poker that is something to remember. I played a hand recently where I ended up losing a significant amount of chips, all of which could be avoided, all because I didn’t heed my own advice about playing certain starting hands.

I am always the first person to say you should never fall in love with a mediocre starting poker hand and play it till the bitter end of a hand. I’ve seen too many times someone play a 10-8 suited all the wau until the river and lose because they were chasing a straight or flush. Well, I was guilty recently of doing such a similar thing in poker.

I know people love those middle suited connectors, and I can see the appeal of them, they offer a lot of possibilities. I was in a hand recently and was dealt a nifty 8-9 of spades. It’s tough to look down at that, I know, and throw it away, but oftentimes you should. When you do play those hands, see a flop and get out if you don’t make anything. Well, I played that 8-9 of spades, and the flop came 2-10-6 rainbow, with one of the suits being a spade. Now with only a belly buster straight draw and no flush draw, I should have been out of that hand. But, possibly temporarily losing my wits, I called a bet to see the turn. The turn showed up a king of spades, so now I was even more stupidly enticed to see the hand through, have both an unlikely straight and flush draw. So I called yet again. As you can expect, the river did not show me another spade or seven, and I ended up losing a decent amount of money that I never should have. It’s a lesson to be learned, you can’t even play sloppily for one hand, it it can cost you.