Quote:
Originally Posted by usernameslol
Poker Clif,
This was a really great response.
I actually don't think we are in disagreement.
I agree with you that winning players have adjusted there expectations to accommodate for short-term loses.
All I was saying was that, for a winning player - a 'winning player' in its core definition i.e. twice as many wins than loses, they are neither happy nor sad. This is because loses, on average, have twice the impact than the gains or wins, so therefore they stay 'happiness neutral'. The greater the number of wins, the happier the person becomes, as the impact of the loses becomes more insignificant.
I suppose you may argue that because winning players adjust their expectations accordingly, loss aversion becomes inapplicable, as the loses have no greater or lesser impact than the wins, which is what you may be trying to say?
Liam.
I appreciate your comment about my "great response". I spend more time in Beginner's Questions than anywhere else on 2+2. I consider my posts carefully, and often edit them after I read the finished product. I am always aware that more players than the one that I am responding to will be reading it, and I can't say enough about what posters in this thread have done for me.
The bolded part of your response is exactly correct. I'm new to live tournament play (well, new to taking it seriously at least). I had been playing a live tournament once every few months "for fun". I played my first serious live tournament last week and I was thrilled to get the final cashing spot (getting most of my buy-in back).
My expectation is to break even in my first 10 or so tournaments, because I'm learning a lot of the mechanics that I didn't have to worry about in online play, such as keeping track of pot size and bet and stack sizes, and all the stuff that I used to track with a HUD. Plus, I still have to learn about tells and a lot of other facets of live games. And on top of that, the charity rake is 20%, so I'm not going to get rich overnight playing these games!
In case anyone is wondering why I would pay the 20% charity rake, I do not live within 100 miles of a casino that holds poker touraments. Also, I'm carefully building a live bankroll, and driving 5 miles to a $20-$30 "starter" charity tournament is a lot easier on the bankroll than driving 120 miles to play in a casino's $50-$100 lowest buy-in tournament.
I didn't expect to cash my first "serious" time out, and the only reason that I expect to break even after 10 tournaments is because the players are really bad (worse than an average $1 online STT) and the fields in the $20-$30 tournaments are small, usually 30 players or less, and small field size cuts the variance way down.
It's all about realistic expectations. I was hoping to cash in at least 3 of my first 10, so doing it the first time out was pretty exciting. And even though I have a massive edge against the field, I understand variance, and I would have been dissappointed, but not crushed, if I went 0 for 10.
You said it well. The "happiness" issue that you raised is all about proper expectation. It's easy to watch poker on TV and say, "I could do that." You're a killer at play money games, or you crush your favorite home game. You could be poker's next big thing!
It happened to me. I got a couple poker books from the library, and soon I was fake-cashing about half of the time against fields of thousands of players--at AOL World Series of Poker. I often went very deep, and there was a woman that seemed to always wind up at my table (more than once at the final table). So we kept telling each other how good we were, reinforcing our delusions. As we used to say when I was in 6th grade, I thought I was hot snot on a silver platter, but I was really cold boogers on a paper plate.
In 2006 I put $50 on PokerStars, and after three months of being slightly up, I lost it all. I had to admit to myself, and my wife, that I wasn't nearly as good as I had thought. But I kept at it, I kept studying, and I eventually found 2+2, where there were good players that not only told me that I wasn't good, but they also told me what I was doing wrong.
Fast forward to September 2011, and I'm seeing if I have what it takes to be a live pro.
Last edited by Poker Clif; 09-23-2011 at 11:21 AM.
Reason: clarity