I haven’t been teaching or even playing that much lately. Every time I turn around it seems that something else has been added to my plate and life isn’t leaving me much time for poker. But that’s alright. I know the wheel will soon turn and things will ease up enough to put poker back into high rotation in my time.

But there is one student that has been with me for a long time that I still teach a lesson to every now and then. We had a few hours together last week and I think our time together taught me as much as it did him. But I’ve always thought that just being open-minded during a poker discussion is bound to teach me something.

My philosophy of MTT play has changed a bit over the last few years. I used to be conservative at the beginning of a tourney and wait for premium hands to get involved with. Now I realize that huge fields and relatively small stacks compared to the blind structure make it necessary to gamble more early and build a stack. So my student and I got involved in a lot of cheap pots with many different kinds of hands.

As it happened, we got lucky in the first hour and amassed a decent stack. It was a good thing too, because in the next hour we lost about half our chips. We’ve all had times like that, where every draw your opponents are on, no matter how slim, comes in and shoots down your flopped set or top two pair. But, because we had built up enough chips, we were only down and not out at the end of the second hour. As I hung up the phone for the second break I was still feeling optimistic about our chances. This was a satellite tournament where the top fifty finishers won a seat into the next step game and more than eighty percent of the field had already been eliminated with less than nine hundred to go.

My student answered the phone on the first ring and sounded as upbeat as I felt as we started the third hour. They say that good feelings and emotions can have a positive influence on your game. Not that I believe that we somehow “willed” our way into it, but we did more than double up twice in a row and where we had started a little below average, we now sat among the top twenty in the chip count.

I distinctly remember saying that we now had enough chips that we didn’t have to gamble so much anymore and that we could afford to wait for some premium hands. I also remember him laughing as he called an all in re-raise with his AQ and still laughing as he lost over 10k to an AK. Then he pushed on an early position raiser with two black eights and lost another 10k to a pair of aces.

I tried to tell him that even though we do need to gamble a bit more in general, there are still times when it’s correct not to gamble. If we can accumulate enough chips then we gain some time when we can fold a bit. But my student was so focused on his aggressive game that he could not even consider changing gears and slowing down a little. All he had to do was chill out for a while and we had a good shot at getting into the endgame with a decent stack, but he just couldn’t do it.

It’s not so long ago that I can’t remember when the more usual problem with changing gears went the other way. Today, instead of finding the guts to pull the trigger more often, many players find it hard to stop pulling it. The phrase, “aggression wins tournaments”, is so ingrained that the thought of playing passively, even for a little while, is thought to be weak. For me, there will always be a time to play aggressively and a time to play passively. The trick is finding the right balance.

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