Allow me to introduce myself. I have “known” how to play poker for many years. I discovered it when I moved to a new school in 6th grade and started hanging out with the “wrong crowd.” (I realized early on that the “wrong crowd” was definitely my kind of people!) We would play penny/nickel poker with our lunch money. We could barely keep the hand ranks straight; much less develop any kind of skill or strategy.

A few years later, when I was a young man in the Marine Corps, I started playing casually four or five times a year. I was playing with other people who “knew” how to play exactly as well as I did. The winner of these games was always the one who drank the least and therefore passed out last. While this can prove to be a money winning strategy for someone with self discipline, it never worked for me.

Fast forward 20+ years to a middle aged man with a family and a good career. I have rediscovered poker in a way that I have never experienced before. I am learning to play real poker with real poker players. It is exactly the kind of challenge that I crave. And my wife supports it more than any other middle aged endeavor that she can think of (assuming that I’m NOT going to take up cleaning the bathroom and vacuuming as my middle age crisis).

I started playing $.25/$.50 no limit Hold ‘em and PLO H/L on Poker Stars, but we all know what happened there. Currently, I am involved in a monthly pot limit mixed game. I also play a lot of $2-$60 spread limit hold ‘em and tournaments in various poker rooms around the Twin Cities. I find that my poker bankroll continues to slowly grow, yet I obsess about the hands that I’ve played poorly.

I would like to take these obsessions, turn them into lessons and share them with you in this column. I will be writing about everything from the subjugation of ego to the danger of slow playing at the wrong time. At no time will this column claim that I am an expert. On the contrary, it is here to illuminate some of the pitfalls that I have fallen into. I will draw my own conclusions about what I could have done better, but you might very well come to a completely different decision. That ambiguity is part of what is great about poker. Even if you are there, understanding the 4 hour history of the table, watching every eye twitch and slow roll, seeing who makes a bluff work and who’s afraid to try, you still can’t really know what would have happened if you would have changed a single aspect of your play.

On the other side of the coin, I would also like to share some of the things that I might have done right.  There is a business adage that states that, “while it’s good to be successful, it is imperative to know why. Otherwise, it’s not repeatable”. I believe in this wholeheartedly. If I get lucky and make the right play once, it might make me $100. If I successfully add that play to my poker bag-of-tricks I can make money with it over and over.

Hopefully, between the failures and the successes, we can all improve our games.

Until the next article, enjoy yourselves and play well.

(Next article: “Learning the hard way that even loose players get good hands”)

Dave Nourse is a former Marine with an M.I.S degree who describes himself as both “very good looking” and an “uber-liberal socialist scum.” We’ve seen his picture, so we know at least one of those statements is a bald-faced lie.