I just read a beautiful piece about being “rivered” or like poker players like to call it “sucked out on the river”. Mike Caro talks about the reason for it and why it happens (or seems to happen) more to good players – because they just play more selective and enter (big) pots holding the best hand…true, so it’s basically an easy equation: if you enter pots while holding the best hand almost all the time, it’s natural that you will get sucked out more than a bad player who enters more pots while holding (possible) junk…

So does this mean I’m a good player? I guess it could be true as I rarely get eliminated from tournaments without suckouts and I’ve been very successfull in (private) live play (10 out of 12 times I’ve been in the money and/or heads up for the overall win taking down 1/4th of all money involved), but I’m not here to praise myself, as a student of the game I know that there’s always room for improvement, especially due to the fact that I’m pretty new in the poker circuit (I started playing regularly in the most played games (Hold’em, Omaha, 7Stud) in November 2005, before that the only poker I played was a simple 5 card draw poker every now and then…so I’m really a newbie to all of this, especially the online poker which speeds up everything and takes away stuff I use in live play (checking out the other players while they’re looking at their cards, evaluating their playing patterns in this particular session, a little trash-talk here and there, etc))!

Hat tip to Derek over at CardSquad for the link to the article.