[gotmarc]

[ QUOTE ]
lucky I like my friends and have fun anyway.

[/ QUOTE ]

This sentence sums it all up. My friends rag on me all the time becaus I don't win every time. They think it's funny that they can "beat me" when I've read 35 books, play tournamments at casinos, play on the internet, post hands here et cetera.

The thing is a lot of it has to do with the structure. My friends play with 40 chip buy-ins. A $10 buy in, so every chip is worth 40 cents. It's winner take all and then they give second place thier money back. They have blinds that start out at 1-3. They raise them every 15 minutes. They sometimes call me and ask "does a straight beats three-of-a kind?"

If you raise 3x the BB like Phil Gordon suggests against a field that does not fold even an overcard on the flop and all you have is 40 chips you're not going to do well. A lot of your preflop strategy depends on stack sizes. You can't look at a book and say well it says to do this so that's what I'm doing no matter what.

If you have 10 Big blinds, you can't play like Phil Gordon would play with 300 Big blinds.

Just remember that they're your friends and it's ussually cheaper to play a $10-$20 poker game than it is to go to a bar.