Wave of Mutilation

I’ve coached about 140 students or so at this point at various stakes and forms of poker. One thing that holds true across the board, more than anything else in regards to holding people back, is results oriented thinking. I have worked very hard to expunge this from my game (thank you Jared Tendler) and you should as well. Personal management is just as important as technical skill in poker, and to succeed you need to get better at both of these things. Countless times a student will come to me with a totally standard hand, or just whining about a bad beat, and it’s a waste of your poker energy. I’m always very tough love in those scenario’s with “so what” or “who cares” and a hefty explanation after of why it doesn’t matter as long as you played the hand well, and if you didn’t, you can learn from it and play well in the future. It seems rather intuitive but still it’s something people mess up all the time. I myself am guilty of it on occasion as well, I’m pretty sure we all are. We all want to lament our bad luck but the reality of it is, nothing will avenge your bad beat like getting it in good again. It also creates a negative atmosphere around your poker game when you’re constantly focused on this stuff. You can’t be afraid to make mistakes, because it’s those mistakes that will create the building blocks that allow you to climb higher and higher, bringing your game to it’s greatest potential so you can repeat the process. Every time I’ve noticed a significant improvement in my poker game I thought the sky was the limit, and I thought I knew it all. I learned again in a few weeks or months, or had some a-ha moment and was blown away all over again. I still make mistakes all the time, and still learn from them.

I’m kind of rambling here but my point is that, your results don’t matter. Your entire goal is to make the best decision possible with the information and variables that you have to make that decision. whether it’s metagame, opponent tendencies, stack size, whatever the variables are, it’s up to you to recognize and process them before you click a button. If you had sound reasoning when you made a play, don’t be ashamed of it even if you lost the hand. If you review it later and you think you made a good play still, you may have. Ask someone better than you. If you played it well, forget it. It’s all you need to do.

So again worrying about results and lamenting bad beats is bad because:

It creates a negative poker environment where you’re likely to be in a losing mindset while you are playing.
It wastes mental (and poker) energy that could be better spent making good decisions at the table or learning something away from it.
It doesn’t improve your game, it backpedals it and creates inbred game states where you do something based on a past result that your brain registers as a mistake, thus creating more mistakes in the future.
It causes you to tilt, and tilt stops you from being able to play your A game, so it inherently costs you additional money when you aren’t playing because you theoretically could be at the tables with fish, instead of lamenting a hand you played well and lost.

There’s a lot more I’m sure but that’s basically the gist of it. Results oriented thinking is the golden goose of counter-productivity.

Good decisions = Good results

Remember that, the game never ends, you just sit out for a while. Are you in it for the short term, trying to get lucky, or in it for the long term, trying to reach your maximum potential?

Besides being too results oriented, SSNL folks tend to play too many tables. I’ve always told every single one of my students, that I want you on 4 tables for the duration of our sessions (less is OK), and if you get bored playing 4 tables, you’re not paying enough attention. One argument for more tables is an increased hourly rate, but I would challenge that with the counterpoint that your play has the potential to decrease drastically as you increase the number of tables, so theoretically you believe you are increasing your hourly rate, but in reality you’re increasing your variance and lack of attention to the games, and may even end up spewing stacks where you definitely shouldn’t or wouldn’t, had you paid more attention to what was going on around you. Multitabling isn’t for everyone and it IS an acquired skill. I think you’d do better to try getting very good at 4 tabling, or as far as you can moving up in limits 4 tabling first (or period).

Do everything you can to increase your hand reading skills. I can’t stress this enough. Learn combinatorics. It’s not hard. It’s quite easy in fact. It’s the pot odds of tomorrow. When you’re taking notes on opponents, don’t just extract what the individual piece of information tells you, think about what else it tells you. Someone that doesn’t value bet thinly and always pot controls second pair type hands or underpairs w/1 overcard on the board are going to have none of those hands in their range when they cbet. That means they’ll be on air, draws, or top pair or better. If there aren’t many draws, then they have a pretty polarized range, and are probably fairly attackable in that situation. I’ll probably ramble on about this more in the future but it’s easily one of the most important things you need to improve to get better and move up.

Be honest with yourself. Brian Townsend has been saying it forever, take responsibility for your decisions at the table. If you’re tilted over a hand, or you made a mistake and it’s weighing on your mind, sit out for a bit. Walk it off. Take a nap. Go scream into a pillow or something. Whatever you need to do to let the tilt slip away into darkness and refresh yourself so that your A game is loaded up and ready to go again. NES style, hit reset.

:) I can’t wait for today’s 2m2mm vid :) :)

Just got done watching Drag Me to Hell and I’d say it was pretty good. Classic Sam Raimi. I was kinda hoping that Bruce Campbell would show up at some point in the movie but maybe Sammy feels the same way I do about Bubba Ho-Tep :( Ohhhhh geez I wish I’d never watched that. Lol.

Done rambling for now, bottom line is, you can accomplish your goals in poker and in life if you want to, you’re the only person holding you back. It’s been said a lot before but it’s absolutely true. Quit daydreaming about it and take the steps necessary to achieve what you want in this world. It’s yours if you want it, seriously.

Leather out :D