Playing when tired/hungover

Ok I had a really nice month, excluding the last weekend where I had 3-4 bad sessions. Some minor tilting, shitty luck and playing tired while hungover. The old stuff. But now that I started thinking about it more in depth, I took noticed some things from my play when tired.

I was constantly getting in bad situations with second-best hands. My tired reaction to this was to tighten up. Now, while this "works" in normal play, here a different mentality applies. When tired, your play loses your dynamic, evolving aspect and becomes stale, predictable and static. A good example:

I get a decent hand, something definitely worth raising... let's say A9s in cutoff. It's folded to me, so I definitely want to raise. Now, in shorthanded it's much less likely to be folded to my raise, than in full ring. There's always some motherfucker out there calling with whatever shit, just hoping to get lucky. The flop misses you completely. Some ragged ass shit you know nobody would play, and nothing you could represent. Now imagine you're on a cold streak.. you play nice preflop because after all... it's very static and predefined by most parts so you think you're doing ok and not tilting. But the motherfucker knows you missed, and he's ALWAYS either calling, or reraising your continuation bet. I mean it gets called every single fucking time. You think you're still ahead, but can't be sure. The turn blanks again, and you check. He bets 3/4 pot, and takes it away.

After all, when you're playing your "ok" game, this is the "right" thing to do when you miss. You close down, and go next hand. Ok the problem with this all is, when you're tired, you always check/fold on the turn. And your opponents read you for air.. you're too tired/bored enough to try to figure out his likely hand range, and his frequency of floating (calling continuation bet with nothing). You do the safe, mindnumbing check/fold every single time, and they keep taking it away with nothing. And after a while, even the multitabling opponents pick this up - and start taking it away from you every single time. You're too worried about tilting and trying to "tighten up your game", that you're too chicken shit to push them around with your whole stack and take back that aggressive control of the game.

Then, comes the bad decision making part. At first I thought that when you're tired you just make "bad decisions", period. Now I understand it a bit closer. The thing is, you grow too bored with the fact that you're always having the second-best hand, and start making stupid pushes, figuring out "he should fucking give me credit, I haven't won a hand on this table in ages". The problem here is that you wish you'll come on top, counting your outs... figuring out "I should win this time, he's outkicked me last 3 times..." and just hope the push gives you enough fold equity as well. The mathematical and logical analysis is replaced by hope and the noice of justification in your mind.

Another thing I learned is, your opponents don't care if you haven't had a winning hand in the past 15 minutes. If you've been aggressive but shutting down in later streets or just taking the pots down without showdown, they still won't give you credit. Hell, you can go folding for an hour, and you won't get much respect for your raises. But once you show down a good hand a take a big pot - that's priceless. Even if you've been raising every hand for the last 2-3 orbits, the moment you scoop an all-in pot where you manipulate the pot size well and outplay a donk - you're gonna get all the respect you need for the next five minutes. I first integrated this concept into my game earlier last week, by not preflop-raising some marginal hands I'd usually raise due to the fact that I've been overly active on that table in the last few orbits. But obviously it has to apply also to the postflop game, even if you play a premium hand.

So yeah... don't play brain-dead kids. And I should stop writing posts when I'm tired.