Hello, I'd like to discuss a thought pattern (logical fallacy?) of mine that has been plaguing me for years, resulting in low confidence, quitting sessions early, and severe mistake tilt.

I am primarily a live player, with ~3000 hours logged and a winrate between $40-50/hour. However, like every poker player, I do make mistakes. And my brain keeps track of the amount I lose to those mistakes. And for every $50 in bad calls, missed bets, etc. I make, I feel like the next hour of my session is going to waste making up for that past mistake. If I catch myself making $300-400 in mistakes, I lose motivation to go to my next session because I feel like I already squandered it the previous day.

Example: Yesterday, I made a bad call for $20, a bad call for $50, and missed $100 in value with bad bet sizing over the course of a 2 hour session. I was up $55, but felt like I wasted 3.5 hours of future play. And also, because I was making more in mistakes than my overall hourly winrate is, I was playing -EV poker and that I would have a losing session if I kept playing, so the session ended up being laughably short, and I left feeling down about my game despite booking a win.

When I play for months at a time, this thought pattern expands into me feeling that I'm a long term losing player who has just run in the top 0.001% of players WRT positive variance over the course of thousands of hours.

I feel like this thought is total BS but can't logically deduce any other conclusion. Any thoughts?

Hi Illiterate:

I think you've been reading too much of the poker psychology literature where much emphasis is placed on your mistakes leading to tilt. Of course, if you knew a particular play was a mistake, why would you make it in the first place?

An example is your bet sizing error. When looking at statistical distributions it's a well known fact (among statisticians) that minimums and maximums are broad meaning that your sizing must be way off before it's truly damaging. And given your win rate, I doubt this would be the case.

Now this doesn't mean you don't make mistakes. But it does mean it will take some effort on your part away from the table to find them. The idea of something called mistake tilt is mostly garbage and that when you play your errors will quickly b apparent and this will quickly lead to tilt is silly.

Best wishes,
Mason

This reasoning is just bad, and I feel like I'm almost harassing you, following you around and saying this after your posts (but since I'm a mod in Psychology, I feel I have to read all the posts so I can't stay away, and I don't mean any of this maliciously). People do things all the time that they know to be mistakes. There are many factors that play into such a thing, such as impulsivity, lack of attention and focus, and being more emotional/less logical. These are all very well known and documented outside of poker (and not just in sports, in tests of knowledge and intelligence). Why should poker be different?

Yeah that would be like fat people eating food they know is unhealthy. Nobody does that

If you feel like a play is the most profitable option you have when it comes time to decide whether or not to commit and you're learning from mistakes that you realize in hindsight you should be constantly improving your approach and ability to assess situations. There are going to be spots where you lose money or make a mistake but if you're approaching a situation as profitably as your present ability allows then you are likely maximizing profitability in a given spot, according to your ability. Realizing mistakes gives you an opportunity to improve your ability.