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Right Frame of Mind
Let's pretend for a minute that you're in the third
hour of an otherwise uneventful hold'em session when you pick up pocket
tens on the button. It's folded around to you and you raise. The small
blind folds and the big blind calls. You have a confident read on your
opponent: This guy won't defend his blind with just nothing, even if he
puts you on a pure real estate raise. So when the flop comes 9-6-2, you
like your hand a lot. You bet for value. Your opponent calls. The turn
is a 4, which doesn't scare you because you know the big blind won't
have gotten this deep into the hand with swill like 5-3. You bet again,
fully expecting your opponent to lay it down now, but he calls. What
could he have? A good nine? If he had a set, you'd have heard about it
by now.
The river is a queen. The big blind checks and you check too, because a
queen is an overcard he could easily have held and hit. Sure enough, he
turns over the winning hand of A-Q and takes the pot.
You replay the hand quickly in your head and emerge from your brief
analysis satisfied that you played every street correctly, from your
preflop raise to your river check. But something about the hand irks
you. Your foe called all the way with just overcards. Does he not
respect you? What does a guy have to do around here to get these mooks
to fold?! That thing that irks you is now like a raspberry seed stuck in
your tooth. The more you think about it, the more it bothers you. It's
hard enough to play correctly, you tell yourself, but when you play
absolutely correctly and end up suffering for others' mistakes, well,
damn, that's just not fair.
A subtle shift has taken place in your thinking. For one thing, you have
mentally accused your opponent of having made a mistake when, in fact,
his play may have been correct. He held A-Q, after all. You could easily
have been on a pure steal (tell me you've never raised on the button
with A-T) and even if you weren't, he still had outs. If anything, he
might have played the hand too weakly; the river bet went begging, after
all. But that's not the problem.
The problem is you've swapped thoughtful analysis for righteous
indignation. Your thinking is now colored by your mood. In an otherwise
unremarkable hold'em session, you have reached a pivotal point. If you
don't get your mind right here, the whole session could go right down
the drain. If you continue to dwell on mistakes -- not even your
mistakes -- you run the risk of blowing a hole in your concentration
and, thence, your stack.
Let's say you pass the test. You shrug off the loss and play the next
hand. Lo and behold, you get pocket aces -- and they don't hold up. Next
hand, pocket kings -- and they don't hold up either! Now you've been hit
by a devastating combination of punches. You're suffering at the hands
of other players' decisions and also the capricious whims of luck. Your
steely discipline is in vapors now. All you can think about is how damn
much you hurt.
When this happens, you lose. Win or lose, you lose, because as soon as
you start to process your pain, you've left your right mind behind and
entered the realm of feeling. You're suffering, and when you're
suffering you shift your focus from playing perfect poker to wondering
why the universe is so unfair. On the conscious level, of course, you
know that the universe is not unfair. You know that you're just
experiencing a short-term setback. Nevertheless, you are experiencing
that setback, and you're experiencing it on an emotional level, in an
emotional way. You are, in other words, feeling the moment rather than
thinking the moment. Once your situation starts to affect your mood,
performance suffers and further bad outcomes may result.
It's a vicious cycle:
You get in a bad mood.
Your mood affects your play.
You make inferior decisions.
You get bad outcomes.
Your bad mood gets worse.
And so forth.
For success in hold'em, then (or for that matter in poker or for that
matter in life), do this:
Focus on how you do, not on how you feel.
That goes for your good feelings too. If you've been running
exceptionally well, if you've been running all over the table, you run
the real risk of getting high on your own success. Rushes are real, God
bless them, but nothing kills a rush faster than the carelessness that
overconfidence breeds. Many a rush has gone south because the player
stopped thinking about the useful question How can I parlay this rush
and my temporarily strong image into a big win? and instead turned his
attention to How can I make this good feeling last?
On the other hand, what's wrong with feeling good? Isn't that part of
why we play poker in the first place? We love the game. We want to enjoy
the experience of playing it. Yet the more we experience our enjoyment,
the less we think about proper play. Performance degrades, and enjoyment
ends. We are thus left with a twisted little paradox: To fuel your
enjoyment of poker, you must ignore your enjoyment of poker.
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