Drink Dilemma

After a long drought, I finally have had some time to play some free poker. A couple of weeks ago I chopped the Friday Ultimate after playing really well all night. The last couple haven't gone as well for me, but then that's poker. I have been happy with the play of my new style and I believe that it is working well for me. Would really like to give it a try at a casino, but that doesn't look too promising in the near future. Today's topic is about what drinking during a bar poker does to your play. No I'm not talking about drinking too much which certainly can happen. I'm talking about the phenomenon known as the Drink Dilemma. It happens more often then you think especially late around the second break. You are having a fun relaxing evening playing bar poker and enjoying your beverage of choice. It is around the second break and you have a small to mid size stack, but with blind increasing your options are becoming less and less. You look down and your drink is about empty. Here is your dilemma. Do you buy another drink and try and grind it out and hope for the best or do you push, take chances or go all in to try and increase your stack before you order another beverage. This may not seem like much, but you can use a persons level of their beverage to your advantage. If someone moves all in or re-raises late in the middle of poker tournament one of the first things I will try and figure what is their motive for moving all. I will check their chip stack and compare it to the big blind. I will look at their drink to see if they are close to finishing it. A really big tell is when they ask a server for their bar tab while they are still in the game. I will ask them if they are trying to go home and see what their response is. This is all information that can lead you to folding or making the call. I will call with a sub par hand if I believe a person is making a move to double up or go home. The last two Friday's I have found myself in the dilemma. The first week, I pushed to try and double up and ended up getting knocked out quickly. The second week, I pushed it again, and managed to double up, so I bought another drink. How did that work out for me? Not so good. Right after I got my drink, I re-raised into Aces and got knocked out. I sure hate leaving a partial drink that I paid for, but there is nothing worse then getting knocked out of a bar poker tournament and having to hang around and have people want to talk about what happened while you are finishing your beverage.
So, remember, there are many tells in a poker game, but bar poker creates many ones that you might not face in a casino tournament.