The Reid Option: Week 8

by Sammy Reid (SammyReid) Last Updated 2018-10-26 13:31:28 Premium Content Part of the product Combo Lite

Each week, Sammy Reid will break down each position in detail, pinpointing his favorite plays at various salary ranges. Who should we be focusing our core on this week? Read below to find out!

Week 8

For those who don’t know my background, I (like many other serious DFS players) was once a online poker pro. And let me tell you – it was awesome. Waking up at 11am, having no boss to get on your case, and taking a day off whenever the hell you felt like it was the stone cold nuts. I was also making more money than I ever had before, and if you’re in your 20s and single in San Diego, you’re gonna have a good time if you have a little weight in your bank account. And have fun I did.

But I also worked my ass off. I spent a ton of time away from the table working on my game, studying theory and breaking down hand histories. A lot of otherwise good players didn’t put in that kind of work – they figured any time dedicated the game should be used for playing, not for homework. But to me, the homework wasn’t work at all – it was fun. I was fully immersed in the game, and I loved all of the things that came along with it. Then on one dark day in 2011, as you probably know, Black Friday happened – the DOJ shut down all the major poker sites from operating in the U.S., and the dream disappeared like a fart in the wind. I had to get a real job and go straight. And poker wasn’t a part of my life for the next seven years.

This year, that changed. I found a nice cardroom just a few miles from my house, and decided to try it out. The first time I went I did really well, and I started playing more and more. Now, less than six months later, I’ve played 69 sessions (niiiice) and logged nearly 270 hours on the felt. Most importantly, I’ve rekindled an old love and found that it was never gone at all. It was always there, just under the surface, waiting for me to rediscover it.

I’ve done quite well overall, but it’s been a big adjustment. Aside from the normal rust of a long layoff, I’ve had to learn a whole new game; there’s a huge difference between high-stakes online sit-n-gos and low-stakes live cash games. I still make plenty of mistakes, and I still have a lot to learn. But I also have big goals: I’m moving up stakes once I hit 300 hours, and I want to buy a house (with 50% of the down payment coming from poker) by the end of next year.

A big reason I believe I can achieve that is my ability to deal with failure. I have a good process: I get super mad at myself, get my tilt out of the way, go back to the lab to analyze why I failed and how to shore up that leak, and then get back to work. I try not to let any one setback get me down too much, understanding that poker is all just one long session over the course of your life – what happened over a couple hours the other day means nothing in the grand scheme.

In related news, I got destroyed last week in DFS. Beat down. Slayed. Rekt. My plays were shite, my lineup construction was shite, my whole approach was shite. It was a definite setback to what has been a great season up to that point. And you know what? It’s fine. You have to go into every poker session and every DFS season knowing that there will be times you lose. It’s part of the deal. The trick is to have a short memory and to rebound strong, not to let it hang over you … and to end up winning more than you lose.