ok this is going to be kinda tough because I'm writing about stuff that most people already know on one level or another yet am supposed to make it sound profound and teach people some new things. I also am not great at this myself. I think I'm up for the challenge though.


I think I'm a pretty good candidate to write this for a few reasons. When I signed up for this I was going through one of my biggest downswings in terms of buy-ins in my life and was thinking a lot about mental stuff. Now I'm on a pretty solid upswing and have made it all back and more. I've also played serious sessions at every level from 25nl through 1knl in the last couple months. Now obviously the 1knl players will be generally better, but especially lately with video sites and stuff like these articles in the micro community even the 25nl regs understand most concepts in poker. But what really is the difference between the better regs and worse regs? The guy crushing 1knl and 25nl? Is it that they know some super-secret concepts? I was discussing some of the better regs at small/midstakes FR, and came to the conclusion that the reason they're the best isn't because they'll make your life hell. It's not because they have the highest red line or because they 3-bet more. It's not because they know a top secret strategy. It's because they simply don't make very many mistakes. They play very solid, understand the fundamentals, are solid hand-readers, and are able to consistently make good decisions. They just don't have many leaks and it is very hard to win money from them.


Now the hand-reading, fundamentals, and knowing the best play is outside the scope of this cotw. But I'm going to make the claim that those are the easy parts. The tough part is once you know the best play making it every time, and keeping a solid mental state. How many times do you get 3-bet and decide **** him I'm flatting my 35s oop? How often do you remember losing a few stacks to a guy and think you're due and decide to spew even harder to them. And these are big problems if they happen a lot.


Let's try to put numbers to this. 2.5ptbb/100 is probably the difference between the best regs and the mediocre ones, say 3.5ptbb/100 vs. 1ptbb/100. That seems like a huge difference, but that's one buy-in every 2k hands. Now most spew doesn't actually cost us a buy-in in ev. But let's say the average spew costs us half a buy-in. I play around 1k hands/hour, so if I make one spew per hour, that's the difference between me being a solid reg and a mediocre barely winning reg. And if I get into the mode where I do it a few times in a row I can kiss any chance of winning pretty much goodbye. And that's why nlhe is such a tough game, because edges are small, variance is big, and the temptation is there to make bad plays that cost us a lot of money in the long run.


Now how do we stop doing this? One of the biggest steps is understanding just how much these plays hurt us in the long run. If we can understand this it can provide us motivation to not make these plays. Some other obvious solutions are to stop playing when you sense the first sign of spew, set a stop loss, or some other method to make sure you don't play when tilting. You know yourself better than I do, and if you really care about preventing spew you'll be able to do it. Now the other thing we can do is to try to put poker, tilt, and variance all in perspective in an attempt to eliminate or lessen tilt rather than just looking to quit when we tilt. We need to really understand just why fish play this game. If there were no luck involved fish would not play poker. We need to honestly see us playing a hand well and losing as a victory. It usually keeps the fish around and he will continue to allow you to put yourself in profitable situations. This is obviously easier said than done and I don't know anyone who can do it 100%, but it's just important to understand this at least on a basic level. So when you lose a hand you have to tell yourself that this is why fish play, and that if they didn't suck out sometimes they wouldn't play you. Another thing is realizing that you are not owed anything. Luck is not personal, the cards don't have a memory, and just by your skill you are not entitled to anything that anyone at the table isn't. You are entitled to win 80% of your 80/20's, you're entitled to win 50% of your 50/50's in the long run. That's all. I can't count the times people complain "how could this happen to me?" "I'm so much better than this fish he shouldn't win a ****ing hand against me, how can they do this to me?" There's no them, no should's, and we need to remove the personal aspect of it or else we will continue to get upset when we lose a big hand due to chance.


Which leads to the next topic, egos. As poker players, most of us are extremely competitive. From the poker players I've met anyway, not many of them can handle losing well. They're all used to winning at whatever competitive thing they did and the majority of other competitive activities we particpate in have a much higher skill element. I played baseball when I was younger. Even though there's luck involved in that as well, generally the better team won the heavy majority of the time. When you lose a game you shouldn't, or personally go on a slump, you can see specifically what you can work on. You can point to the errors that led to losing the game, the bad pitches, the bad swings. You can go back and hit off the tee, go hit in the cages. In poker you can be on a downswing and still playing solid and the feedback just isn't there. The feedback of poker just ****s with our minds, and we really don't like it. It's very hard to figure out if we're playing well or not because there's no feedback like there is in most other competitive activities. We feel helpless and feel like we should have some control of whether we win. But the bigger problem isn't that we can't control not winning it's that we think of the wrong thing as winning. As hard as it is to separate the money from poker, the better players are the ones who can do it the best. Winning isn't winning money, it's making better decisions. Instead of being frustrated when we get sucked out on we should actually feel triumphant in our victory. We won, we played the hand better, and in the long run we'll profit. We all know this deep down somewhere, and none of us can actually get into this mindset 100%. On one level or another we all play this game for money, so we're never going to be able to get completely away from being results-oriented. But we can do the best we can to concentrate on how well we played the hands rather than our results.


And finally this leads to our overall mindset towards our career playing. I've posted about this a little bit, but I had a very interesting conversation awhile back about variance with a friend. He told me he actually looked forward to downswings because that was where the challenge was. Anyone can play well when they win every coin flip. Anyone can play solid when they're flopping sets every few hands. It's when you are constantly getting coolered, constantly sucked out on, and just running bad that you begin to question yourself. The biggest challenge in the game is playing well during these periods where nothing goes right. I still don't really believe that he looks forward to downswings, but this is a mindset we can all strive to attain. How often do you hear the outfielder looking forward to the routine fly ball hit right to him? It's all about the running catches, dives, spinning on a dime and needing to make a perfect throw. So why would we look forward in poker to times when our opponents hand us money? The only problem is that talking about that diving catch you made in the bottom of the 9th is a bit sexier than talking about how you managed to only lose 5k during a bad run when most people would lose 10k, but that's just as much a part of your winrate as the money you win when running good. If you go through a stretch where you win 15k during a good run and lose 5k in a bad run that's just as good as winning 20k in a good run and losing 10k in a bad run. Money not spewed is just as good as money won. Just as we did the math with spew, minimizing losses during downswings is the same way. If we use running bad as an excuse to play badly it's going to cost us money and cut into our overall longterm winrate. So next time you're 5 buy-ins down on the session and spewing trying to make it back try to put it in the big picture. Even though immediately the difference between being down 5 and 10 buy-ins may not even be huge and you'll feel ****ty either way, it's going to put a pretty big dent in your winrate. Also on chasing losses, say you're down 5 buy-ins and looking to make it all back. If you are one of the best players at your stake and play about 1k hands/hour, that's 5 hours to make it back on average. If you take into account that you're probably not playing your A game it's likely longer. So you're trying to make it back quickly which means basically you are attempting to run good. Approaching any session or part of a session with the approach of hoping to run good is just going to be a mental disaster. Because more than half the time you will run bad and even when not running bad you will likely be looking for the higher variance spots rather than the higher ev spots.


Anyway I was kind of all over the place here and I'm pretty sure most of you know this stuff on some level or another. Hopefully it was helpful to see it all together. If there's one thing you take away from this though, it's that the difference between a mediocre small/micro stakes reg and a solid mid/high stakes reg isn't that they have sick soul-reading abilities. They probably do have better hand-reading skills and a better understanding of various ranges people have in different spots. But imo the biggest difference you will see is that the solid regs are the ones who are playing their A game almost all the time and you will rarely see playing badly. They are able to go through a downswing and still make good decisions. They understand that randomly spewing is not going to help the downswing and that they need to continue to think about ranges and what the best play at each point in time is. And that's not an easy thing to work on. It's all mental discipline. Read through a HA thread on 2p2 sometime if you don't read them normally. These are the toughest decisions people are running into and most people can come up with a good line relatively quickly and sometimes there are arguments meaning the ev difference between lines isn't even that large. Poker on the surface is a pretty easy game, you can fold, call, or raise. But especially when multi-tabling online, the tough part is making the right decisions all the time that quickly.


More money is made by the lack of mistakes in basic hands against fish than is made by making the right decision when you get double check-raised on a drawy board against a tricky reg. So while by no means do I mean you should stop studying everything you can about the game, I think a lot of regs could improve their winrate by simply improving their mental discipline. If they would avoid mistakes like bluffing calling stations or calling a shove from a nit when you beat one hand in his range, or other basic mistakes that we all know are mistakes, this would improve their winrate far more than learning how to respond to check-raises from regs. And it's very ironic that despite the fact that it makes a bigger difference in winrate, it's often the thing that is most ignored by poker players. They play when they're tilting, spew left and right, then look back at their graphs and wonder why they don't have that great a winrate and all these other regs that have so many leaks (the same leaks they have when tilting) are winning more than they are. So they make excuses. They're running below ev, they run worse than anyone else, anything to avoid the reality of it. They know they have the understanding of the concepts to win, they just don't have the mental discipline to play well consistently and because of that their winrate suffers. And that's extremely frustrating to us. And there's really only one solution. Every time you sit down to play a session you need to focus on playing your A game. Every decision needs to be a good one. No one will ever make zero mistakes, but the thing all of us can immediately avoid is making mistakes we know are mistakes.


Out of all the cotw's this one is useless if you don't understand most of the other ones, but I think this one touches on the subject that has the highest impact on winrate out of all of them. If you understand a subject but can't apply it because your mentality just isn't there, it's useless. So next time you sit down to play a session think about this. Think about the true cost of tilt/spew and think about the long run and the reason we play this game. If you can improve your mental discipline and really utilize the poker skills you already have I guarantee it will have a solid impact on your long-term results.

First

Wow good job! At first I was like : I won't read all of this. But I started to read and I had to read it all so I did.

This part is gold IMO, I had never done the math of how a mistake of a buy in could change your win rate:

Thanks!

I find the mental game of poker such an interesting part of the game. I would even say that the mental part is just as important as the strategy part. If you guys haven't done so, you need to watch all of jared tendler's videos on stoxpoker. He's a licensed mental health coach. It will blow your mind.

I find the whole issue of setting a stop loss pretty interesting. We tell ourselves that the money doesn't matter but when we set a stop less, it actually shows that we care a great deal. A stop loss is a direct example of how unsure we are of our abilities. Our goal should be to eventually stop having a stop loss. If you aren't taking the correct steps needed to grow as a player then you will always have that stop loss which prevents any meaningful progress. We should be putting in just as much effort into our mental game as we do with strategy.

fourth

That's kind of the scary part of poker. We're all novices at some level or another. And when we are running bad, are we playing bad? Are we just getting unlucky? Even if we are winning, are we getting as much as we can? There are very few things in life where the feedback can be do disparate from the process. And that is totally against how our minds are trained to work. We aren't programmed to process delayed feedback. We are programmed to connect decisions with what happens immediately, not with the long run.

And we all understand this on one level and perhaps we kind of overcompensate the other direction. I know when I first started 5NL, I would follow TPTK to the ends of the earth and play the hell out of those hands. When I was continuously getting stacked by sets and two pairs, my initial reaction is that I was just getting unlucky and I was making the right plays. But that's not right either. When I started reading 2+2, I started learning about things like ranges and polarization and realized I had to let up on my TPTK hands and play in a way where I could get money from worse hands. My results sucked because my play sucked.

Point is that trying to tease out process from results isn't always easy. That's why HHs are the staple of this forum and why graphs and stats are confined to its own thread. It's just amazing that people played poker before these resources became available. It's just comforting to know that we make the right decisions and if we don't, we find out about that too. Where my profits fail to provide me instant feedback, the people on this site fill that need for instant feedback. It makes for an effective learning tool since it gives us a decision and an immediate impact (your comments).

So let me encourage people to post lots and lots of hand histories. It really helps with the mental game since it's more in sync with how our minds work. We all learn from it.

Nice post. Very important stuff.

@Strongsville I agree a player with a perfect mindset would not need a stop loss but I'll counter the fact that this player with a perfect mindset does not exist. Ultimately for all of us there is a point where the results will bother us and we will begin to play worse. Whether it's 5, 10, or 50 buy-ins depends on the player but I believe there is always a threshold where our play begins to suffer. The higher it is the better because it means we can put in more hands without having to worry about stopping and if you're good at recognizing tilt it's probably better to just stop when you're tilting rather than specify some arbitrary number. But the reality is 99% of poker players are playing much much better at the tail end of a +5 buy-in session than the tail end of a -5 buy-in session.

@DDAWD very good point usually when we're in a very bad downswing it is a combination of running bad and playing bad. We don't want to go too far the other way either and assume we're perfect and not work on our game any. Also getting others to help you with your game/review hands will not only help your actual game but also will boost your confidence which helps a ton with being able to stay sharp mentally.

This is such a great, great post. The mental game is 100% the hardest part for me, I had to self-ban my chat to control my tilt, and I take swings hard. I'm printing this out and keeping it near me. Great work.

Very good post.

During the end of september and most of october I suffered my first real downswing. Being card-dead for 7k hands in a total of 22k. So I felt the need to check whether I was just unlucky or was making too many mistakes.

For september, I calculated my total cost in mistakes in BB/100 by looking at every spot I put money in the pot and then resolve for EV. All -EV situations that weren't balanced by IO or FE on later streets were added to this total. Result:

September (6k hands): Mistakes = 15 BB/100 !!!

Wow! How can I hope to win at poker when I spew 15 BB/100? Seeing this (big) number
made me look closer at my play and find some typical mistakes that I could remedie.

October (5k hands): Mistakes = 12 BB/100

Not as much improvement as I hoped for but this was during a downswing and most of the money that I lost was due to tilting in some way or another. I got most of my mistakes out of my system except the mental ones that come from a downswing. I was prone to tilt after 4-5 suck-outs in a session (didnt know this before).
Played the same style in november:

November (5k hands): Mistakes = 6 BB/100

The difference between october and november is just mentally. Thinking about the mental side of the game saved me 6 BB/100.

Reason to post this:
Just to put some more numbers to the mental side of the game.

wow this is good..i was reviewing my yesterdays sessions and cound't understand where did 1 buy-in go..and then i saw many places where I was floating/bluffraising in good spots..but I did it with ~0% pot equity..i think this is what this article is about - always analyzing each play in all the possible aspects..like bluffraising only with outs(gutshots, draws etc)...

good poast mane

thought provoking

needed some of this........

Solid gold.

So many good things in it, i don't even know what to comment.


Thats a lie.

That was a great article. Thank you OP!