Three coolers and the winner I folded
An overnight session at Choctaw Durant with three coolers in it. The coolers were bad luck. The river fold that came after one of them was me.
I sat down at Choctaw Durant on a Monday morning and got up on Tuesday afternoon.
Somewhere in between, the room turned over more times than I can remember. Dealers rotated, the dinner crowd came and went, the late night regulars showed up, and then the morning crowd took their seats like I had never left. Mostly because I had not.
It was a no-limit hold'em cash game, the kind of table I like: loose enough that the pots get big, friendly enough that the hours slide by. I did not plan a marathon. The game was good, I was focused, and every time I thought about leaving there was another orbit worth playing.
It was a losing session, and I am not going to dwell on the number. What I want to write about is how it went wrong, and the one decision that still bugs me.
Three coolers
I got coolered three times. If you do not play, a cooler is a hand where you have something very strong, your opponent has something slightly stronger, and nobody at the table is folding. You did not misplay it. The cards lined up so that all the chips were going in, and they went the wrong way.
One cooler is poker. Two in a session stings. By the third it starts to feel personal, even though you know it is not. Each one took a big bite out of my stack, and each one landed in a spot I would play the same way again.
That is the strange thing about coolers. On paper they are the easiest hands to accept, because there was no mistake to fix. In practice they are the hardest to shake, because there is no lesson to hold onto either. You just lost a lot of chips for being dealt a good hand.
The fold
The coolers I can live with. The hand I keep replaying is the one that came after one of them.
Not long after taking one of those beats, I got to the river in a hand, faced a bet, and folded. I had the winner.
I know why it happened. I had just been burned holding a strong hand, and the memory was fresh. When the river bet came I was not really reading the player in front of me. I was reading the last hand. Some part of me had decided that a big bet meant I was beat, and it made the decision before I had thought it through.
That is tilt, even if it does not look like the usual kind. Nobody slammed the table or shoved with rags. It was quieter than that: a little fear, a little gun-shy, enough to talk me out of a pot I had already won. The cooler cost me chips. The fold after it cost me a pot I had earned.
What I am taking home
When I logged the session afterward I did not write much, just a line about the coolers and the fold. Looking at it now, that line is the whole session. The coolers were bad luck. The fold was me.
What I am keeping from this one:
- A cooler is over when the hand is over. The next hand does not know what happened in the last one, and I should not play it like it does.
- Notice the quiet tilt. Playing scared after a beat costs as much as playing angry. It just does not feel like tilt while it is happening.
- Take a breath after a big loss. Sitting out an orbit after a cooler costs nothing. Folding a winner costs a pot.
- Know when the session is over. Overnight into the next afternoon is a long time to keep making good decisions, and being tired makes it easier for one bad hand to become a bad read on the next.
I will be back at Choctaw. The game was good, the people were good, and the cards even out. Next time the cooler comes, and it will, I want to let it go before the river does.