My Poker Education – Part I

By Star Pulver

 

I remember so clearly, the first day I walked into a poker room. My grandmother paved the way for me. The women in my family have always been gamblers. We believe that life is a gamble and we’re not afraid to take risks in life, with men, with money and with our careers. She couldn’t wait to introduce me to her new friends at the old fire station on the Sycuan Indian reservation just outside of San Diego. At that time, it was the only place to find a legitimate poker game.

I walked into the six-table card room with my $200 bankroll and my grandmother at my side. To my surprise, I noticed that we were the only women in the entire room. I pulled out a hundred dollar bill, which was exchanged for a rack of chips and away I went. Honestly, I had no clue what I was doing. I played about every hand to the end, calling $3 and $6 bets and within minutes I was pulling out my last hundred. When I finally won a pot, I was ecstatic! I thought to myself, “Now I’ve got the hang of this”. My first poker lesson cost me $200 and lasted a total of 55 minutes! 

I loved the game of poker but I wasn’t very good at it, I just played for fun and that was expensive. So, at the age of 32 after leaving the banking industry and a failed attempt at starting my own business, I spent 2 weeks at poker dealing school and landed a job as a poker dealer. From the box, I could study players; how they acted on their hands and how they interacted with each other. I always tried to guess what they had before the show down and more often than not, I was correct. My game started to improve but I never really took it seriously.

In 2000 I took a leap of faith and accepted a position as a tournament director. I had little or no experience at playing poker tournaments and I was literally thrown into the position so I had to study hard and learn fast. I studied all the rules and read a few books on tournament play, I found Mike Caro’s book on Fundamental Secrets of Winning Poker to be the easiest to comprehend, but mostly I learned by watching the players at the table. There was very little no-limit poker at the time. It wasn’t until 2003, when Chris Moneymaker won the WSOP Main event that no-limit poker became a “must” at all tournament venues.

Accustomed to Limit hold’em, No-limit hold’em was a whole new world for me. I watched time after time as players put all their chips in with the best hand and got out drawn. I felt their pain and watched them as they commenced their “walk of shame”, exiting the tournament area.

Like many, television has been a major contributor to my poker education. I can’t get enough of “High Stakes Poker” and the “WPT”. I relate my style of play to Jennifer Harman’s. Like Jennifer, I am not mathematically inclined and refuse to study the odds or percentages of any given hand winning the pot. From all of my experiences running major poker tournaments and all of the players I have witnessed going all in with the best hand, I firmly believe the odds are always 50/50. You will either win or you will lose. I rely a lot on intuition, an advantage I believe most women have. I do practice the concept of “pot odds” and understand the importance of position and hand selection. I’ve probably only played in about 20 tournaments with buy-ins of $100 or more. I’ve placed in 4 and I have won 1. I guess those aren’t bad results, but being the perfectionist that I am; I want to bring my game to the next level.

I have taken some time to reflect on my game and have determined that I could use some help in the following areas; I find that I often get too caught up in the moment; I neglect to take the time to really “read” my opponents. I find that women are much harder to read if they are less experienced and I often confuse “nerves” with “tells”; When it comes to men, I can read them pretty well but when I can’t get a read, I just refuse to be bluffed (perhaps my biggest downfall). So I looked around for a service to assist me in elevating my game.  There are several opportunities out there of course, books, seminars, coaches, but I chose the World Series of Poker Academy Ladies Only event on June 8^th and 9^th, to further my poker education.

I’m really excited about attending. I respect and admire Annie Duke who will be one of the instructors and I’m particularly interested in meeting Joe Navarro, the retired FBI special agent who is an expert on non-verbal behavior (“tells”).

I will be following up this article with part II of “My Poker Education” to let you know if and how the WSOPA was able to improve my game. For those of you who haven’t signed up yet, it’s not too late! I hope you’ll join me. Check the web site for details.