Following my 3rd place WCOOP finish, someone commented, “Congratulations on the win. Seems a little weird though that you have your best day ever and your just kind of meh. You should look into that.”
In fact, I was mostly proud of myself for the even-keeled way in which I accepted everything that happened to me in that tournament. I was definitely feeling the adrenaline at the final table, but I made a conscious effort to relax and focus. When I lost with TT < A6 to finish in 3rd, I honestly didn’t feel more than a very slight twang of frustration, anger, or disappointment. Likewise, my most profitable single day didn’t leave me feeling particularly smug, self-satisfied, or even excited.
Maybe that makes me sound like a robot. This was something that used to worry me about poker. I realized early on that it wasn’t good to get upset about bad beats or even mistakes that you make. You just have to keep playing your best and focus on the current hand. Dwelling on the past can only hurt your current performance. That was easy enough to accept.
The corollary to this, that you also shouldn’t get too excited when you win, seemed more troubling to me. Did I really want to turn murder my emotions in order to get better at poker? Assuming I were able to train myself to do stay so level-headed, what if it spilled over to the rest of my life, and I ceased to enjoy other good things that happened to me? Again, I liked the idea of not getting upset about bad things as a general life philosophy, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to lose my ability to get excited about good things.
This remained a dilemma for me for several years, until I heard an interview with Tommy Angelo, author of the excellent Elements of Poker. Bart Hanson asked Tommy exactly this question, and Tommy’s response drew heavily on Buddhist philosophy. Essentially, he explained that it was attachment that one ought to avoid. That is, both in poker and in life, one shouldn’t rely on outcomes and material things for happiness.
The idea isn’t to be emotionless, it’s to take joy in what you are doing rather than in what you have or whether you are winning or losing. This is what the Buddhists call “being in the moment”, as opposed to dwelling on good or bad things that have happened in the past or that may happen in the future. So at the poker table, your happiness should come from enjoying the mental challenge of the game or good decision-making or just being alive but not from winning or losing. I found that very helpful.
“Maybe that makes me sound like a robot. This was something that used to worry me about poker. I realized early on that it wasn’t good to get upset about bad beats or even mistakes that you make.”
I tell you Foucault what happened.
You internalized new primary objective-“So at the poker table, your happiness should come from enjoying the mental challenge of the game or good decision-making or just being alive but not from winning or losing. I found that very helpful.”
I suspect that earlier your primary objective was I want to win.
The key word is “internalized”.
you are talking about happiness-emotions.
Where is your center of emotion Facault? -deep,deep inside you.
Your conscious successfully passed goal to your subconscious.
Poker players have great goals.The big problem is internalize them.
Congratulations you did it!
you are now poker killing machine!!.
I agree. It’s important to note though that getting frustrated when you lose and getting exited when you win are not independent from one another. It’s much harder to keep your cool when you take bad beats or make a mistake if you do a fist pump every time you double up or whatever. You’ll be anticipating that good feeling and if it doesn’t come it will make you feel bad due to it’s absence.
Well said.
It should be noted that if you were a Buddhist, you certainly wouldn’t be playing poker for the material wealth it brings you 🙂
I find that rather than attempt to be emotionless, or even attachment-less, which I really don’t like, it helps to focus on your actual long-term equity as opposed to the short-term variance.
Poker simply isn’t a short-term game, there is far too much luck involved with each individual outcome over which you have no control. It must be absolutely irrelevant to you what the short-term outcome each hand is.
Say you get it in for $200 with AA over KK and your villain rivers a K. Did you just lose $200? No. You just won $163.89, payment has just been deferred. So you can be just as happy about losing all-in with AA than winning, because it just doesn’t matter.
Of course, that’s a really simple example, and your actual equity gets much harder to estimate when you don’t know if your guess at your opponents range and tendencies is correct, etc, which I presonally find the most frustrating aspect of poker. But you can still strive for the optimal attitude by simply ask yourself, each hand – will my decision in this hand, at this point, make money in the long-term? Did I draw the right conclusions, make the right decisions? If not, or if I’m not sure, how can improve my skill?
Simply put, if you are concerned with poker’s short-term outcomes, you are gambling, not playing poker.
Sayeth Nomanr:
“Say you get it in for $200 with AA over KK and your villain rivers a K. Did you just lose $200? No. You just won $163.89, payment has just been deferred.”
That’s a common misconception shared by, I’m guessing, oh, 99% or so of poker players. 🙂
Let’s flip coins for $1 a toss, 0 EV. You lose the first two flips (and there’s a 25% chance you will), so you start out $2 in the hole. Your EV for the next ten flips is still $0, so your EV for the entire series is now -$2. You could do another million flips, and your EV for the entire series, if you include the first two flips you lost, would still be -$2.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get your money in when you have the best of it. But a loss is a loss (and a win is a win). It’s just that the universe doesn’t give you (or your opponent) a “make-up”.
Far bigger names than any of us here have gotten this wrong, too. The Daniel was once caught saying (I paraphrase) that when he plays cash games, he knows he’s earning $X per hour even if he’s actually losing. Considering the stakes he plays, that borders on insanely delusional. When you’re losing, you’re losing. Telling yourself you’re winning doesn’t change the fact that you’re losing.
Not quite correct.
Obviously your chance of winning or losing the next all-in doesn’t increase or decrease based on the outcome of the previous hand. This is rule 1 of probability.
However, you have an expectation that over a large sample size, your return on any such situation will approach the expected value.
This doesn’t mean that you haven’t lost $200 in that one hand. What it means is that that loss is part of your march to an overall profit of $163.89 for all-in AA vs KK, and in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t matter that it happened in this particular hand vs any of the others.
The corollary, of course, is that when you win that all-in with AA over KK, you also haven’t won $200, but still only $163.89. So you need to also modify your expectation when winning.
“This doesn’t mean that you haven’t lost $200 in that one hand. What it means is that that loss is part of your march to an overall profit of $163.89 for all-in AA vs KK, and in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t matter that it happened in this particular hand vs any of the others.”
I would say that the reason it doesn’t matter is that it’s beyond your control. There’s no sense in worrying about how the cards fall, because there’s nothing you can do to change them. I don’t think it’s quite correct to say that a $200 loss is part of a march toward a $163.89 expectation, though. Lin’s analogy is a good one. If you enter a game where you will flip 1000 coins at $1/flip at even odds, your expectation for the game is $0. If you lose the first flip, your expectation for the next 999 flips is still $0, but your expectation for all 1000 flips is now -$1.
In other words, short-term results don’t even out over time. They just become less significant as your sample size grows larger.
But the point is exactly that – if you are playing poker and not gambling, you don’t have arbitrary fixed beginning and ending sample points. Your sample size is infinite and it’s irrelevant on which particular hands or in which sequence your wins/losses occur.
If you’re doing the right things, the occasional jackpot win is part of your normal variance. It’s part of the 0.3% of your results that lie outside three standard deviations of your mean. The more poker you play, the more of those 0.3% results you will see – both good and bad. That’s how I look at it.
I think if you tend to get all wound up about jackpot wins, the counter is likely to also be true – you have trouble handing big losses or long losing streaks. I also am inclined to think you probably suck at poker, or at least aren’t playing up to your ability. That’s because for whatever reasons – mathematical ignorance, “attachment” to outcomes, or other psychological issues – you’re not taking an objective view of your results.