Jezus v NASA...
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Quote:
Why you suck at poker
You can’t think for yourself. Your understanding of poker comes from what you’ve been taught, like a cookie-cutter. You don’t have the ability to come to your own logical conclusions, and you have no idea what to do in new situations that you haven’t been cookie-trained in (no fear though, you can in some cases be taught how to be logical lol). That’s why you lump in with the rest of the grinders, spending seasons in the abyss trading coolers with other people too stupid to realize "hey, there’s 5 regs at this table and myself, I could probably find a better spot. Like maybe a table with an actual fish .
You play too many tables. You rely on rakeback. You “chalk it up to a cooler” too much. You don’t do enough homework. You don’t think about your game enough. You think you know it all, when really you don’t know jack fucking shit. You spew in spots where you’re crushed like a retard asking out a prom queen. You assign qualities to your opponents that they just don’t have. You overthink, you underthink, you estimate terribly. You don’t value bet well. You fail to stack people where you can, leaving tons and tons and tons of ptbb’s laying all over the felt. You don’t have a plan for the rest of the hand. You fire too many barrels. You fire too few barrels. You don’t even know what you’re going to do when you face a raise a lot of the time, let alone what turn and river cards are awesome/terrible.
You’re complete shit when it comes to reading hands. You let whimsy control your game. You play too many tables. I know I already said that one but you know what, it seems like a good time to reiterate it. You play too many FUCKING TABLES. You can’t make good decisions 8 tabling if you don’t already have a good internal idea of what those decisions should be. If you haven’t been there through a ton of 2-4 tabling repetition, you won’t “get it” while 8 tabling. So stop. You don’t know how to count card combinations (an excellent way to increase your hand reading ability). You let your emotions influence you and you tilt too much, even if you “aren’t the type to tilt too much”. You don’t work hard enough. You don’t put enough hands in and you quit winning sessions too soon, hanging around while you’re losing and on tilt (IE your winning sessions are your shortest, and your losing sessions are your longest). You’re not honest with yourself. You self-soothe and do whatever you can to justify your plays or lack of motivation to yourself. You find others to be miserable with, you may even have a network of dreamsowers lamenting their every lost flip and overpair vs. a set. You may even sit around and talk about how good you all are or will be, and how you crush the game, and are just unlucky. Jacking off each others ego so you can feel good about how great you play just to spite how shitty you’re running. Most of all, YOU KNOW A LOT OF THIS ALREADY.
I could go on and on here, but I think you get the idea. Am I talking about you? Am I talking about me? To some extent. I’m talking about all of us in some way or another. We’re all guilty. Anyone who takes this game seriously and wants to make a living, an income, a business out of poker. I tell my students all the time, It’s there if you want it. Do you? When are you going to be honest with yourself and change? How many years are going to go by before you realize you haven’t improved and you’re still where you were? It’s true that poker isn’t for everyone. Some people can absolutely not stomach the swings. Some people can’t weather the storm of mental beatings and abuse that you go through in this game. Some people aren’t mentally tough enough. Above all you need to be honest with yourself. If you’re happy being an SSNL grinder, making a better-than-average income, hats off to you. But for those of us with something else burning inside, there’s a whole world we haven’t discovered yet in this beautiful game.
There are some things that can not be changed. We live in an information era. There is so much information to be found about the game, coaches to be hired, sites designed to help people to stop being fish and maybe becoming a shark someday, yet I don't think most of the people here use these things to their benefit, because that would mean they wouldn't do 99% of the things they do, and say 99% of the things they say. Set goals. Aim for whatever is realistic. Don't let shortterm results affect your judgement. You've all heared or read this 100 time or more, and claim to understand it, but you do not act on it.
Be honest with yourself. Train yourself mathematically, statisticly, make the neccesairy investments. Get the hands in. Look at those hands objectively and change what needs to be changed. Recognize patterns. Act on them. Recognize how different types of people play and exploit the mistakes they make. Ask yourself how people exploit your mistakes. Don't play scared. Don't be affraid of variance. Embrace it, as it is what keeps so many players believing in the idea that they are in a supposed downswing and not just losing players. Teach yourself how to read hands. Think about the game, read about it, discuss it. Ask for critisism. Give something back to the people that helped you get where you are at. Don't burn bridges. Get to know yourself and see that the psycholgical aspect of the game is 99.999% what goes on in your head, and only 0.001% what you claim to have as an emotional effect on your opponents.
Don't alter your play when you're losing. If you can not do that, take steps so that you can. Hide the view on your winrate and current online roll. Play every hand the best you can, while not forgetting metagame and longterm importance. Do the best you can do, and never whine or complain. If variance bothers you, run simulations about standard deviations on winrates over a certain amount of hands. Don't play different when you're winning. Make sure that when you run hot, get the maximum you can get, in stead of settling for what is easy to get. Earn your money, don't just win it. Money won is money that you will inevitably give back when the rolls in the hand are reversed compared to the way you just stacked your opponent. Almost everything is variance, and clear cut. Your winrate lies in the very few things that aren't. Recognize these things. Don't let variance get to you, embrace it. I know I've said that already, but you don't just have to know it's being said a lot, you have to do it. And most of you do not, otherwise you would have more money earned, and you wouldn't whine and complain because you fully understand what is going on.
Try to get somewhere and keep track by keeping crystal clear records of how you get there, or failed to get there. Do what you have to do, but never blame anyone else but yourself if you do not succeed. Doing so is stupid, shows a lack of self knowledge, a lack of knowledge about the game, and a lack of self discipline. Train your memory. Doubt yourself when you should and believe in yourself when you should. Learn how to recognize the difference between the situations where you would better do one of these, rather than the other. Understand the games' variables. Understand position, stacksize, table image, reversed table image, pot odds, hand strength, implied odds, reversed impled odds, current state of mind, preflop game play,flop game play, turn game play, river game play. Realise that every one anyone of these streets, one can be assigned a range. This is an information game. Gather information, combine it, draw the best conclusion that can be drawn and leads to the best mathematical decision. Keep in mind that any of these variables, including the look in your opponents eyes in a live game, or the twitch in his finger, don't change your decision. They change the mathematical calculation that leads to your final decision. Sometimes drastically, sometimes very slightly. Realise that a mathematical equation with many different variables of which most are intervals, and not set numbers, is always going to lead to different answers. Learn how these variables interact with eachother. See the patterns. Ask yourself why you do what you do and change it if you're not 100% on it.
Be a perfectionist, not a person who whines and complains, but does not have the right to do so, because he did not do everything he could, and that that is the only reason he feels as if there is no justice in the outcome of a hand, or a number of hands, and that it is therefore his own fault. Become better and faster in doing these calculations. Realise that most of them are nothing more but estimations. Become better at estimating. Realise that your hourly rate is what is important at the end of the day/week/month/year/decade, and do whatever you can do make it a better hourly rate. Better meaning higher, and not less variance. Embrace variance. Take the initiative. Realise that almost all good players worked very hard to get to where they are. Don't ask someone to do something for you if you can do it yourself. Search for valuable input, because it is out there. Don't expect it to come to you. If it does, see it as variance, and realise that if you really want to achieve something, at one point or another, you have to do it yourself.
Only play with the right mindset. Don't lie to yourself about downswings, upswings, winrates, level of play. Don't compare yourself to a fish, compare yourself to someone that is better than you. Don't always be happy with what you have, and if you are, don't let that stop you from digging deeper, going further. Happy does not and should never mean the same as currently inactive. These little mental changes, such as taking a positive result as an encouragement and trying harder and try to become better, in stead of standing still because you are happy, and thus wasting your time in stead of doing all you can do, at the end of the day, when added up, create the difference between a winner, a loser, and bigger winner. The big things are mostly common knowledge, and should be known, but are also almost always just a form of variance, something you can not control. It's the small things, changes in attitude, in actual play, that define your winrate.
Realise that you can drop 5 buyins and still run hot. Realise that you can win 5 and run bad. Realise that you can drop 5 and play great. Realise that you can win 5 and play terrible poker. Know the difference between negative and positive variance, whether it be the fact that you were behind on his total range but decided to put him on one precise hand and happened to be right, or the fact that your opponent hits a 4 outer on the river, but also had no way of folding and was coolered in the first place, because he could beat 90% of the hands in your range. Know the difference between playing good and bad, and not only the parts that are very clear cut, but also the tiny, subtle things, which at the end of the day are so much more important. Which, at the end of the day, decide whether you win or lose. Realise that a winrate is always very small compared to a buy-in, in any game, and that one shouldn't hope to win big at any time, because that will inevitably happen anyway, just like it will also happen that you will lose big, without it being in your control, even slightly. The fact that a winrate is very tiny compared to a buy-in for whichever game, is the ultimate proof that only the small details matter, because the big details are very easy to arrange, as they are common knowledge.
When you can, table select. Don't let your ego get in the way of things. If it's for fun and games, that's fine, but if it actually alters any of the things above, you've got a major problem. Force yourself to have a good work ethic. Force yourself to be good for the game, and generate action. Be polite, and friendly to your opponents. If you do not have the discipline to do this, because of some short term thing that happened, you probably do not have the discipline to be a good poker player, and you probably didn't remember anything of what you should focus on.
Work hard. Train your work ethic, your endurance, your motivation, your precision, your mental thoughness, your ability to focus. Don't play for money, or a winrate. Play for a higher goal. Set one for yourself. Every time you sit down at a poker table, know why you are there and what your objective is. Realise that the fact that you do not understand a certain play, does not always mean it was stupid, but can just as often mean you got outplayed and in a way that is so blatant that you do not even know it happened. Analyze. Interpret. Try your hardest.If you do, you will not whine complain. You will have a set goal, and have found your own ways to get there. Reward yourself when you do, but be reasonable. Always be reasonable. Think before you act. Don't tell yourself that you thought before you acted when you did not. Get to know yourself as precisely as you can. Get to know the game as much as you can. Know why you did what you did and what other options you had. Never let the variables which affect your decision out of your sight. Never let a variable that should not affect your decision in to your sight. Be objective, be precise, be analytical, be openminded, be smart, be hard on yourself, be honest about and to yourself. Don't be a fucking fish.
Ask yourself questions, in which the answer is already revealed. I'll give an example. Suppose you c bet almost every flop; but if you happen to flop a monster, you check it and slowplay. What are you repesenting with your c bet? It can't be a monster, since you check these. A simple example like that should already bring up thoughts about how one actions affects another, and how one range affects another, and how one action affects another one. If you choose a line, make sure it makes sense. Don't push the river with air when the flush card came and be amazed when you're called with two pair, stating that 'come on, he had to be affraid of the flush', while if you did in fact have the flush, you would have bet 3/4th of the pot. Make sure that if you play a hand a certain way, you should play another like that, too, if you want to represent the first hand. Look for connections and what is related to what. Know what your opponent is thinking. Think ahead. Don't call a c-bet on a J-high board with 99, because you think the preflop raiser might have missed overcards, if you full well know he will bet the turn regardless, because he knows why you called the flop bet, but just hope he does not. Be creative.
I’ve coached about 140 students or so at this point at various stakes and forms of poker. One thing that holds true across the board, more than anything else in regards to holding people back, is results oriented thinking. I have worked very hard to expunge this from my game (thank you Jared Tendler) and you should as well. Personal management is just as important as technical skill in poker, and to succeed you need to get better at both of these things. Countless times a student will come to me with a totally standard hand, or just whining about a bad beat, and it’s a waste of your poker energy. I’m always very tough love in those scenario’s with “so what” or “who cares” and a hefty explanation after of why it doesn’t matter as long as you played the hand well, and if you didn’t, you can learn from it and play well in the future. It seems rather intuitive but still it’s something people mess up all the time. I myself am guilty of it on occasion as well, I’m pretty sure we all are. We all want to lament our bad luck but the reality of it is, nothing will avenge your bad beat like getting it in good again. It also creates a negative atmosphere around your poker game when you’re constantly focused on this stuff. You can’t be afraid to make mistakes, because it’s those mistakes that will create the building blocks that allow you to climb higher and higher, bringing your game to it’s greatest potential so you can repeat the process. Every time I’ve noticed a significant improvement in my poker game I thought the sky was the limit, and I thought I knew it all. I learned again in a few weeks or months, or had some a-ha moment and was blown away all over again. I still make mistakes all the time, and still learn from them.
I’m kind of rambling here but my point is that, your results don’t matter. Your entire goal is to make the best decision possible with the information and variables that you have to make that decision. whether it’s metagame, opponent tendencies, stack size, whatever the variables are, it’s up to you to recognize and process them before you click a button. If you had sound reasoning when you made a play, don’t be ashamed of it even if you lost the hand. If you review it later and you think you made a good play still, you may have. Ask someone better than you. If you played it well, forget it. It’s all you need to do.
So again worrying about results and lamenting bad beats is bad because:
It creates a negative poker environment where you’re likely to be in a losing mindset while you are playing.
It wastes mental (and poker) energy that could be better spent making good decisions at the table or learning something away from it.
It doesn’t improve your game, it backpedals it and creates inbred game states where you do something based on a past result that your brain registers as a mistake, thus creating more mistakes in the future.
It causes you to tilt, and tilt stops you from being able to play your A game, so it inherently costs you additional money when you aren’t playing because you theoretically could be at the tables with fish, instead of lamenting a hand you played well and lost.
There’s a lot more I’m sure but that’s basically the gist of it. Results oriented thinking is the golden goose of counter-productivity.
Good decisions = Good results
Remember that, the game never ends, you just sit out for a while. Are you in it for the short term, trying to get lucky, or in it for the long term, trying to reach your maximum potential?
Besides being too results oriented, SSNL folks tend to play too many tables. I’ve always told every single one of my students, that I want you on 4 tables for the duration of our sessions (less is OK), and if you get bored playing 4 tables, you’re not paying enough attention. One argument for more tables is an increased hourly rate, but I would challenge that with the counterpoint that your play has the potential to decrease drastically as you increase the number of tables, so theoretically you believe you are increasing your hourly rate, but in reality you’re increasing your variance and lack of attention to the games, and may even end up spewing stacks where you definitely shouldn’t or wouldn’t, had you paid more attention to what was going on around you. Multitabling isn’t for everyone and it IS an acquired skill. I think you’d do better to try getting very good at 4 tabling, or as far as you can moving up in limits 4 tabling first (or period).
Do everything you can to increase your hand reading skills. I can’t stress this enough. Learn combinatorics. It’s not hard. It’s quite easy in fact. It’s the pot odds of tomorrow. When you’re taking notes on opponents, don’t just extract what the individual piece of information tells you, think about what else it tells you. Someone that doesn’t value bet thinly and always pot controls second pair type hands or underpairs w/1 overcard on the board are going to have none of those hands in their range when they cbet. That means they’ll be on air, draws, or top pair or better. If there aren’t many draws, then they have a pretty polarized range, and are probably fairly attackable in that situation. I’ll probably ramble on about this more in the future but it’s easily one of the most important things you need to improve to get better and move up.
Be honest with yourself. Brian Townsend has been saying it forever, take responsibility for your decisions at the table. If you’re tilted over a hand, or you made a mistake and it’s weighing on your mind, sit out for a bit. Walk it off. Take a nap. Go scream into a pillow or something. Whatever you need to do to let the tilt slip away into darkness and refresh yourself so that your A game is loaded up and ready to go again. NES style, hit reset
Ik weet dat het lange artikels zijn, maar er zit heel veel waarheid in.
Ik heb ze gekopieerd van PCB omdat er hier wss toch een hele hoop volk zit dat daar niet komt of dat deze post gemist heeft.
Voor iedereen met goeie voornemens voor het nieuwe jaar denk ik dat dit grondig doornemen al een stap in de goede richting kan zijn
Edit: heb enkele alinea's ingevoegd in de tweede tekst, het is waarschijnlijk nog steeds niet optimaal maar die tekst is ook niet echt alinea-minded geschreven
Als iemand nog gelijkaardig artikels heeft, ge moogt ze altijd posten!
