The Mental Side

Introduction

In this article

• Which mental mistakes can get in the way of your poker career
  
• How much success is depending on a comfortable environment
  
• Why you should never make any decision under the influence of emotions
  

“We’re shutting it down! Everybody go home, we’re shutting it down!”

When I worked for my family business, my dad was famous for losing his cool over setbacks, big and small, which would lead him to storm through our warehouse, waving his arms and yelling the aforementioned order at the top of his lungs. Production would come to a screeching halt and there were big financial ramifications, all over a temper tantrum.

Based on that experience, I made it a goal in life to never make a bad decision in poker, golf or life because of anger or frustration.

You’d be surprised how much success at the poker table has to do with creating a comfortable environment in which to make decisions.

For the third installment of my three-part series, “Where Poker Businesses Go Wrong,” I’m going to focus today on the mental side of the game. My belief is that inefficiency is what typically derails what would otherwise have been long-lasting poker careers.

Here are the mental mistakes that I most often see derailing otherwise promising poker careers:

Most common mistakes

In poker as in life, slow and steady wins the race. This is seriously unsexy advice but consider the source: I am a seriously unsexy poker player and I am not a genius poker player. My A-game is worse than some of those I play against on a daily basis. But much more often than not, I come out the winner. How does that happen?

How good your A-game is, is close to irrelevant in poker. As I said, many people playing at their peak are good enough to steal a pot from the present-day greats. But the real question isn’t “How good is your A-game?” it’s “How often does your A-game show up?” Even if you play your A-game 90 percent of the time, it does you no good if your other 10 percent stinks.

I’ve sat with a lot of guys who do some brilliant stuff. Even if I beat them, I understand their thought process and what they’re trying to accomplish with a given hand. I learn a lot from players who don’t earn nearly what I do or win nearly as often. With some of these guys, my A-game is only their B+game. My best stuff is worse than theirs.

So why do I win more often? Because I’m always on my A-game, or their B+ game. They might have their A-game 10 percent of the time, their C-game 60 percent and their F-minus game, where they’re on crazy tilt, 30 percent of the time.

A lot of people don’t realize the power that simply being a slave to disciplined play has to keep you at a consistent level of high play, every day, every hand. If you are ultra-observant when you’re taking the necessary steps to prepare yourself and when you play and practice, you’ll have far more edge than you’re giving up to a player with a genius A-game that comes and goes. You’d have to have a much, much, much worse game than someone else to lose to him if you’re disciplined and he’s not. If your game is consistently solid and there’s a lack of variance in the way you play, you’re basically at peak efficiency all the time. I’ll give you an example:

When the brilliant Hare is playing his A-game, he makes $500 per hour. When the more disciplined and consistent Tortoise is playing his A-game, he makes $200 per hour. Who will make more over 100 hours? Tortoise, most likely. Why is this? Playing their A-games for 100 hours, Tortoise would theoretically make about $20,000, while Hare would theoretically make $50,000, right?

Let’s say that Hare’s A-game shows up 20 percent of the time, during which time he’d make $10,000 (20 hours x $500). Another 30 percent of the time he’s playing his B/C-game which makes him $200 per hour, that gives him $6,000 (30 hours x $200). We’re at $16,000, with 50 hours left to play.

Let’s say another 30 percent of the time he’s drunk, on tilt or generally unfocused, and during this period he breaks even. For these 30 hours, he makes $0, so we’re still at $16,000. For the remaining 20 hours, he’s a moron, fighting for every pot and bluffing everybody when he shouldn’t. For these 20 hours, he loses $500 per hour, or minus $10,000.

Hare’s total winnings are $6,000, while the even-keeled Tortoise made $20,000. Slow and steady wins the race. Is Tortoise’s best stuff better than Hare’s? No way. But as you can see, that fact is almost irrelevant. This is a testament to the power of discipline.

When you’re running bad, you’re even unluckier than you think. I’ll explain: If you’re putting all your money in when you’re in a dicey spot and you keep running into the nuts then you aren’t learning anything about your opponent’s game — but he’s learning a ton about yours. All you can see is his top-set type of hand, but he sees your entire range. This puts you at a massive disadvantage.

Furthermore, you’re not a robot here, you’re a human being and when it feels like every damn hand runs you headlong into the stone-cold nuts, you can become downright passive if you are not careful. If someone raises you on the flop, your immediate instinct is to not want to play back with a hand you might have otherwise played, had you not been running so poorly. I mean, who the hell wants to play back at someone who has the nuts every hand? Our brains go into fear mode and we start to compound our mistakes. How can you make rational decisions, factoring in all the possible hands your opponent might have, when all you can think of is the worst possible outcome? It’s like playing poker with a grizzly bear at your door.

It’s easy to assume that Doyle Brunson, Phil Ivey or even the wunderkind Nanonoko veritably print money every time they’re at the table. This is far from the case. Even they have massive ups and downs, and while they might not want to admit it, I’m certain they have all felt at one point or another as if they’ll never, ever win again.

What differentiates them from the rest is self-confidence. The difference between the common player and the one who has endured over tens of thousands of hands (if not millions in the case of an online pro), is a sense of: ‘I’m the best. I’m going to keep winning.” It’s not the good runs that separate the men from the boys; it’s the bad ones. These bad runs can go on for 50,000-100,000 hands, possibly even more. They can cripple poker players and their dreams and send them back to bagging groceries by the end of the week. But they can only do this if you let them.

Here are what I feel to be tried and true ways to get things going back in the right direction.

• If anything, when you’re running bad, you should play more aggressively. You have to remind yourself that the person you’re playing doesn’t know you can’t win a hand right now. You need to keep playing aggressively, betting on the range of hands you think your opponent could have, rather than presuming he’s got the nuts every time. He’s making the play based on what he thinks is possible for your hand and you should do the same. Forget about the past and make the best play possible.
• Win or lose, I rarely look at the cashier. Knowing how much you’re down only results in you feeling desperate. Suddenly, your edge dissolves and you’ve become a common gambler, trying to make back his losses and dig himself out of a hole.
• Take note of times you’ve run good. We tend to have a much stronger sense of when we’re running bad than the other way round, in which case we attribute our good fortune to skill. To use a baseball analogy: you can’t take the bloop single, but then smash your helmet on the dugout steps when your screaming liner gets snared by the shortstop. Fortune cuts both ways. Acknowledging positive variance makes the bad times more palatable and keeps you from crossing into tilt.
• Finally, you’ve got to play. When things are running poorly, people tend to not want to play. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I need a break as much as the next guy. But if you take two weeks off, you’ve compounded the error. You were running bad and now you’ve not made any money for two weeks either (plus you probably spent more than usual on entertainment, etc. during that time). Now you’re really down. I’ve got seven days left in this month, and I’ll probably play 50,000 hands during that period. Maybe I’ll start running good and make a buck a hand like I sometimes do and suddenly I’m back in business. I wouldn’t have had that opportunity if I were on vacation.

Say you’ve historically won 20 cents a hand over a million-hand career. Bar any significant changes to your game or the poker landscape, you are probably going to win 20 cents over your next million hands, as well.

It stands to reason then that if you play 3,000 hands in a day and you’re a 20 cent/hand winner on average, you should win $600 a day. If you somehow win $1,200, you’ve had good variance. If you break even or lose $600, you’ve had bad variance.

For some reason, we in the poker community tend to only see the word variance as one that describes a bad run. But in truth, variance is both good and bad. For every 100 hands you play, two might invariably go well, two might go badly and the remainder will be consistent with your skill level. Dealing with the two that run badly will have a lot to do with your long-term success.

When we cool off, our first instinct is to presume that something is wrong: “I’ve lost three days in a row. It’s my fault. I’m no good anymore.” Nothing could be less true. Great poker players can go 100,000 hands or more and not make money.

The newer you are to the game, the harder it is to deal with variance, because you have a much smaller sample size. There have been a lot of guys who’ve quit their job after a couple of hot months, only to discover they were experiencing good variance. Likewise, many a poker career that could have been profitable never got off the ground, because of bad variance at the outset.

How can I tell if I’m running good or bad? There’s no way to know definitively. But there are some tools you can use. Hold’Em Manager has a statistic called “$ (EV adjusted).” The statistic essentially calculates your equity percentage of the total pot when you go all-in and compares it to what you actually won.

So let's say you go all-in preflop with AA and your opponent has TT. I'm 80.5% to win a $400 pot.

80.5% x $400 = $322, so what it's saying is, on average, I should win approximately $322 of the $400 pot when I go all-in with AA vs. his TT.

• If I win, I’ll take the entire $400 pot, so I’ve won $78 more than I would have on average, in which case I’ve been pretty lucky. I’ve won $78 more than I should have in this spot (even though I might feel like this should have happened because my hand held up: at the outset of my career, I always thought I ran badly because I never recognized when I ran well).
• If I lose, I win $0, so I’m running at $322 less than I would have on average, in which case I’ve been unlucky. Maybe, though, I’ve not been as unlucky as I feel because I wasn’t entitled to the $400, just the $322. I’m like the driver who gets in the first fender bender of his life at the age of 65, and feels unlucky. In fact, he’s been lucky, because statistically he should have been in an accident a long time ago. He’s been driving for about 50 years and this mild accident with no injuries is the worst accident he’s been involved in.

$ (EV Adjusted) tells you what should have happened in these all-in situations. It is shown directly to the right of the money-won column in your copy of Hold’em Manager.

This isn’t a perfect statistic, nor is it the sole determination of whether you’ve been lucky, unlucky or normal. But it can be a useful tool in determining whether or not you’ve been running good or bad, despite its inherent flaws.

About the author

Dusty Schmidt is an instructor at PokerStrategy.com, as well as the author of Treat Your Poker Like A Business and Don't Listen To Phil Hellmuth: Correcting The 50 Worst Pieces of Poker Advice You've Ever Heard. In his five-year online-poker career, Schmidt has played nearly 9 million hands and won close to $4 million, without ever having a losing month. He is a columnist for Card Player Magazine. 

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