Losing Well

Barney: Hello, my name is Barney Gumble, and I'm an alcoholic.
Lisa: Mr. Gumble, this is a girl scouts meeting.
Barney: Is it, or is it you girls can't admit that you have a problem?

Iggy makes an interesting and valid point about losing in his latest "uber-post". His basic premise is two-pronged: 1) losing is part of poker; and 2) losing is more often caused by flaws in one's own game than flaws in the game of one's opponents, or "the cards", or any other cause.

He's right, of course - just take a look at my stats from July. I have 24 recorded sessions at the 3/6 tables on Party in July. (I count sessions differently than PokerTracker; if I get up and immediately move to a different table, I count that as one session, whereas PokerTracker would count it as two.) Of those 25 sessions, 19 were winning sessions that netted me a total of $1,239, for an average of $65 per session, or almost 11 BBs, and an average of about 6 BBs/per hour. Not stupendous, but not terrible either, right?

Now let's look at the losing sessions. 5 losing sessions were I dumped $572, for an average of $154 per losing session, or 26 BBs. Ouch. To be fair, the hourly loss was a tad over 4 BBs/hour, and a full half of that loss came from one very long session where I dumped $288, but even then, the other sessions are still averaging a $71 loss.

On the $288 day, could the players have been "sucking out" on me that entire day? Of course not. I probably steamed away at least half of that loss. Tilt comes in many different forms, and for me, the tendency is to start "running scared". We all know that scared money doesn't win, or at least doesn't win as much as it could/should. I also know for certain that when I was down $190, I told myself to stop playing for the day, but a half-hour later I was back on dumping another $100. That's another form of tilt; not being able to stop when, in our gut, we know we need to stop.

Too often, though, losing players blame the cards, or suckouts, or any other of a host of reasons. In LA, a favored response is to blame the dealer -- as if the dealer has any control over what cards come out or how players bet their hands.

Psychology is a big part of poker, both on and off the tables. Winning poker players have learned how to deal with the psychology of losing. They understand that it's all one big session, and that if they are continually introspective, analyzing and improving their game, the short-term losses will be offset by long-term gains. They avoid tilt in all of its various forms, and they minimize their emotional investment in the game, even when the bad beats do come. Winning players understand that poker is a game of processing information through logical filters and detach their emotional feelings from that process as much as possible; they also understand that sometimes, you can play a hand perfectly and still lose. Losing poker players just curse at the screen and wail about how an opponent sucked out for a pot that they "shouldn't" have won, never once even pausing to consider if they misplayed the hand in any way.

Yes, bad beats happen. They're a part of the game. But so is bad play. It's like the driver in a car speeding down a street who, because of a car/pedestrian/goat in the street in front of him, hits his horn before he considers that he is speeding and hits his brakes. Which one is more likely to make the driver "feel better", and which is more likely to result in a long-term positive outcome?