Shine, Inner Luckbox, Shine

So who's up for mounting a grassroots campaign to get Al on Celebrity Poker, now that SoCo is an official sponsor? I mean, hell, Jason Bateman has been on there, how high can the celebrity bar be? Don't poker blog celebrities count?

Not much pokery to relate, as ScurvyWife and I drove out to the boondocks of Manor last night to look at some property. Looked pretty sweet on paper, as far as 20 acres of land and a 2,700 sq. foot farmhouse in need of much repair, but the reality was a little more Deliverance than we were willing to handle. Apparently the local zoning requires at least two abandoned school buses on blocks parked out front of every trailer, with gypsy families living in them. Plus the repair part would basically mean, umm, tearing the whole thing down and starting from scratch.

I imagine it's impossible to quantify, but lately I've been wondering about luckbox equity, for lack of a better term. Pretty much any MTT that I make a serious run in and get deep I can pinpoint a hand or two where, for whatever reason, I get many/all of my chips into the pot with the worst of it, get called, yet luckbox my way into a win.

This usually happens mid/late in a tournament, often with medium pairs and a shortish stack. Someone limps from early position, I push with 1010, folds back to limper who calls with AA, I spike a 10 on the flop and double up. Or I try a squeeze play from the button with 87h versus two tight EP limpers who are folding their way to the bubble and one finds a call with AKs, but a flop a pair and it holds up. Or any of the really obvious examples where you try to steal with junk, run into a huge hand in the blinds, but suckout and win.

Stepping back a bit, it'd be pretty dumb to recommend any of the above situations, so it's kind of dumb to even begin talking about luckbox equity, much less quantify it. We're talking complete dumb and utter luck, which isn't reproducible nor exploitable.

One common thread, though, is that initial aggression is what puts you in position to activate your luckbox powers. You can't suck out on someone and double up if you don't get all of your chips into the pot. Ideally we only want that to happen when we're a favorite, but we can't always get what we want.

Or, more simply, we want to look back and find an example of two where we luckbox our way into a big pot in a MTT, where we push too hard, get our hand caught in the cookie jar, yet manage to escape. If we don't see a few of those, we're usually playing too passively and not giving ourselves the best shot at success.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that the old poker maxim of not being afraid of falling on your sword in a MTT is very true. Being active and pressing the issue will sometimes backfire, but it's a much better alternative than meekly blinding off your chips, never giving your inner luckbox a chance to shine.