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Does anyone else get angry?
An extract from If by Rudyard Kipling:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss... you'll be a Man my son!
I struggle with that last part. If I manage to get all of my chips in as an 81.82% favourite in a tournament-defining pot to become an absolutely untouchable chip monster who is about to run away and win the lot, and I lose, I will breath a word about my loss. The same word. Over and over again. Then I will need to kick something and break my toe in the process. Once I am sufficiently wounded I will post the hand on a public forum in some vain attempt to garner some sympathy, only to meet with the ever so empathetic response "raise more pre". Poker is torture. Surely every poker player has a bit of the sadomasochist about them? Or is it just me? Discuss.
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss... you'll be a Man my son!
I struggle with that last part. If I manage to get all of my chips in as an 81.82% favourite in a tournament-defining pot to become an absolutely untouchable chip monster who is about to run away and win the lot, and I lose, I will breath a word about my loss. The same word. Over and over again. Then I will need to kick something and break my toe in the process. Once I am sufficiently wounded I will post the hand on a public forum in some vain attempt to garner some sympathy, only to meet with the ever so empathetic response "raise more pre". Poker is torture. Surely every poker player has a bit of the sadomasochist about them? Or is it just me? Discuss.
Comments
Unless you're a budist monk, and accept the bad beats and ups and downs with a shrug of the shoulders (on the grounds that's just the way things are and you can't influence them in any way) then poker is not a game that is conducive to good mental health. Arguements around variance and incidences v sample sizes don't soothe the sole, as few (if any) players will ever play enough hands to be able to just dismiss them as a statistical normality. In most games, contests etc, it's usually the case that the most skilled player will win, but not with this game - setting aside all of the (statistically sound) arguements about "the longer term", this is a game where the best player, or the one with the greatest appreciation of the game, doesn't always win, and in fact frequently loses.
We all think we can aspire to reach a level of proficiency that can consistently beat the game. A few do. Most don't, although as long as those people have an aspiration of doing so, Sky and the sharks will continue to make money.
The emotional ups and downs are just one part of the price to be paid for aspiring to beat the game. Playing poker should carry a public health warning.
It's actually a really interesting subject this, and coming from a chess background I can tell you that, psychologically, poker is a far easier game with one very important caveat - you're playing at the right buy-in level for you.
Goethe's point about poker being psychologically quite oppressive is a fair one, but I personally believe we all have to have a sense of awareness about what luck/fate *could* do to us before we sit down at the table. We could play a perfect session, make all the right decisions and still lose if that's the way the deck decides to behave that night. It kind of sucks, but the tonic to this is to know you're making the right decisions.
Again, Goethe raises a fair point, which is none of us are going to play enough hands to really feel like the maths is evening out for us. When the Monte Carlo calculations are run and someone decides that As-Ks is a 50.084% favourite against 2c-2d, we're never going to play out all of those 1,712,304 flips that programs like Pokerstove work out for us. We have to take it as something of a faith - AK v 22 is just a flip: you win about half, you lose about half.
The fact we can't ever genuinely feel that the maths works itself out shouldn't stop us from trusting it though. A lot of our knowledge is built on scientific concepts which some genius has proven on a higher level and the rest of us take for granted. I believe it should be the same when it comes to poker maths.
Why is, in my opinion, poker easier than chess psychologically? Because in chess you have nothing to blame but yourself. Lack of hard work, lack of talent, lack of preparation.... all of it shown up in the slowest, most excrutiating fashion. You could be playing a competitive game of chess, know you're up against it after the first hour and then struggle for all your worth for another three hours. If you're against the better opponent, you have only a slim chance of making it out. You still have to try though, otherwise you're doomed to losing. When you do lose, all you have is cold hard facts to look at. A bunch of absolute moves, with no variables (knights always move the same way, etc), your preparation before hand and how it compared to how the game played out, and then the result. From that you have to deconstruct everything and critique it unless you want to make the same mistake again.
In poker, the temptation is to attribute too much of losing to luck. People also get lazy analysing their game when they're winning. I'm a prime example - I had one very good year and in that year I didn't learn a single thing about poker. It meant the following year people caught up and I didn't know what had hit me. I thought it was variance, but actually it was me being lazy and not taking the challenge of playing the game as seriously as I could have done. My fault and I got what I deserved. My advice - always analyse the play in as cold a fashion as possible, no matter if you're winning, losing or breaking even. There's always something to glean, or a trick you might have missed. It makes playing the game and applying those findings even more rewarding, imo.
There are some really interesting books out there on the psychology of poker, one which came to my attention in Vegas. 'The Mental Game of Poker' by Jared Tendler and Barry Carter. Barry is very much a friend of Sky Poker and has been along to SPTs and on the channel, but I only managed to get my hands on the book from Jared at the Series. It's an AWESOME read and helps with explaning a lot of tilt issues, etc. It's not a cheap book, but it's worth every penny.
Right, that's enough waffling from me. Feel free to fire any questions/tear my post apart if you like folks - I love a good challenge
Dave
P.S Awesome poem, that.
P.P.S I'm not a sadomasochist, despite the length of this post...
I won a copy of this when I first started playing and am at present making my way through it. I'm fairly new to poker and it's probably a bit too advanced for my level but I have to say it has certainly helped me.
The intermediate & advanced player would get a lot from it I reckon.
I suspect it is also a book I will read & refer to and read again & again as I progress.
pad
It's also a book you have to work through in stages and keep going back to over time. It's definetly more of a coaching book rather than read it cover to cover and pass it on.
Read?
nah
What type of hat?
next
I was debating the "is poker a game of luck or skill" question not too long back and said that, with regards to skill, it was the equivalent of playing chess where every 5 moves someone moved some of the pieces at random, or awarded one of the two players an extra queen. Playing like this, even a grand master would regularly lose against inferior players. It wouldn't be a game of skill any longer.
You're right . . . it sucks.
Add that to me managing to cut my private parts on a rose bush earlier it's not been a good day.
I think I might buy a new hat.
Variance is a mathematical fact.
Luck is about beating or losing to the mathematical odds - i. e. winning or losing against the probability of an event. Variance is the spread of events around the expected mean.
The myth is that a losing run and series of bad beats will be evened out eventually. It may be but not necessarily to the same individual. As Trevor would say cards have no memory. There is a pool of luck that over time will even out or over a group may even out but not necessarily within the lifetime of a player or for any one individual within a group.
There is a man who fell 3000 feet from a plane and walked away against all the odds ( and no he didn't have a parachute ). How long would it take for that luck to be evened out ? Or how about the Japanese man who walked away from the Hiroshima bomb and reached Nagasaki in time for the second bomb to hit and survived again.
Variance works across populations as well as across time so whereas the mean luck allowance per player will average out to zero for a significant part of the population, for some , in accordance with the mathematical principle of variance, the luck allowance will be more or less than that mean value.
If you record your bad beats and suckouts over a reasonable period of time and collate the figures you will see it in action. Now , as I've put you all to sleep , I'll stop . G l all !
Response to Re: Does anyone else get angry?:
It was nothing exciting. I was sorting a connifeur out which was next to a rose bush. I was going commando and had a pair of shorts on. I somehow got snagged on the rose bush, moved backwards and it managed to go through my shorts and into my privates.
It hurts a bit and I might have swore a few times.