Nick is a cash game player, content creator and part of 888poker’s Stream Team. Each week he shares his thoughts and experiences as a player dedicated to the daily grind. This week, he considers one particular downside of streaming your play: giving the game away…
With both 888LIVE Manchester and UKPL Leeds in the books, both without meaningful success, it’s back to the online streets for a few weeks before heading off to the next stop in Reading. Unfortunately for me, about the only thing that’s gone worse than the live arena in recent times are my battles on the online felt. I have a few weeks to put that right, or at least stem the heavy bleeding, but when you’re streaming that’s certainly easier said than done.
I’ve spoken before about how having a life revolving around poker sometimes leaves me with very little energy to study and improve my game. But the reality is you can’t expect to win in competitive online games without at least topping up your knowledge every now and again. My choice seems to be between potential burnout and a chance to give a better account of myself at the tables, but as a streamer it’s rarely as black and white as that.
Explaining my decisions… to my opponents
While I will be forever grateful to have the opportunity to stream poker for a living, it has inevitably created my biggest mental barrier for improvement. Playing in the same pool of players on a consistent basis can be a benefit to the better players, as they are able to gather stats on their opponents and use their tendencies to exploit them. I certainly use this information to my benefit on as many occasions as I can to give myself an edge, but the information I am giving away is the bigger problem.
On my stream, I’ve always done my best to explain my thought process as best I can, giving reasoning for my decisions wherever possible if I’m able to provide it. While I was hammering away at the 10NL Challenge this wasn’t as big of a problem, as players were either less likely to seek to exploit it, or they wouldn’t know what to do with the information even if they had it.
Moving up to 100NL has meant playing against the same, very competent regulars on a weekly basis, and unfortunately they are much better at exploiting this information. I know for a fact that there are several of these players lurking in my stream, all while I am explaining why I tend to overfold certain situations and underbluff others. I know that this is almost certainly having an effect on how they play against me, and I’d be surprised if it hasn’t directly cost me a few buy-ins along the way.
The inner struggle
What has almost certainly cost me more is my own mentality in the face of these circumstances. Instead of being able to calmly reason through my thought process and make a decision, I spend the first 10 seconds of my timebank wondering about what hands my opponent has seen me play that are similar to the one I’m in, and how that should affect what I do. I also have to consider what it means for me in the future if, for example, I fold a river that I theoretically shouldn’t. Will they attack me again in the same spot later because they know I’ll under-defend?
Whether it’s true or not is irrelevant, because when faced with the situation in the moment, I find it impossible to just see it as a poker decision. The fact is, any one of these players can look at all of my hands in every session if they want to, and a lot of them are good enough to use that to their advantage. I know I would do the same. And simply knowing that is enough to second guess every spot I’m in, which is a horrible situation to be in when you’re playing for meaningful amounts of money.
A problem I’m lucky to have
On top of that, I have the affectionately named ‘bumhunters’, who aren’t regulars of the game but just want to play against me to see me in the most pain possible. Just this week I played against a player I’d never seen before, who overbet every time I checked to them. My adjustment was to trap every hand I had, but both times I called down I got shown the nuts. At the end of my stream, they popped into chat to thank me for ‘paying for their kebab’.
I’m not sure there’s a good solution to the problem, but I am largely consoled by the fact that getting to play and stream poker for a living is the only reason I have this issue to begin with. What I do know is that if finding the time to study and work on my mentality gives me the slightest chance of not having to pay for that guy’s kebab again, then I’m going to do it.
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Images courtesy of 888Live/Nick Eastwood
