Quote:
Originally Posted by napsus
i'm all for fixing underlying leaks and i have also read the Jared Tendler book 2 times, but i don't completely agree that i am blocking or avoiding something by not looking at results like you said. we all agree that plo is high variance game, anyone posting brag graphs or whines based on 20k hands gets "lol sample size" comments. odd oddsen says that even yearly results are subject to variance. so why would it matter how much up or down you are on a session? rather look at if you made good decisions or not, if you handled tilt well, how long session you managed to play etc what Tendler suggests to base your session success on. also, you can analyze your session without looking at ev or results (thanks HM2) which are both subject to insane variance within a session. so if session results are somewhat irrelevant, why should i expose myself to them? the longer i don't look at them, the more process oriented i become; i judge my session success based on how i played the hands and not how much money or ev i made. and that's the goal, right?
I agree that PLO is an insane variance game and it doesn't matter much how much you are up or down on a session. I would argue that looking at a graph of your session allows you to draw some conclusions or at least validate a bit your estimates of how you played/ran. Even without assuming that to be true though - if it doesn't matter how much you are up or down on a session then why ignore it anyway? Why can't you look at how you played the hands and become process oriented while still knowing how much you made or lost for the session?
I see zero downsides to looking at your results and overcoming the effect it may have on your emotions or mental state to work towards a stronger position where you can simply look at how well you played and work on playing better. If you don't look at your results for a period of time however I can see some potential downsides.
1) What happens when you do eventually look at your results? Let's say you don't look for a month. After the month you feel like you have played well and improved yet your results are really terrible. You may second guess yourself and it's a lot harder to think back to some of the earlier sessions and know that you played well than it is to look back at a session you just played and look at how you played and regain confidence in your abilities and rating.
2) What happens if you want to go back to looking at your results after every session, or even during the session? This can be particularly handy if you are taking shots at higher stakes games or if you are playing on a tighter BR than usual. You may be ill prepared for this scenario,
especially if taking shots or playing higher than normal since the swings will be even more brutal than you are used to. And "not looking" may not be an option if you are practicing sensible BR management.
3) There will be times when you can't avoid knowing the results. Live poker and tournaments are two examples. If you have been ignoring looking at results for so long and having good progress at becoming more process oriented, you might not be prepared for when you do see your results. In such cases I feel like your emotions would still be tied to the results rather than your performance as you would have lacked the experience of playing while looking at results and still being process oriented.
Like I said before I used to think the same way as you - and I definitely think that not looking at results is a much better solution to looking at them constantly and having them affect you negatively. But I still think the best option of all is to evolve your mental game to a state when you can look, or not look, and it's all the same to you. It's like there are two pathways that lead to the goal of being less results oriented and more process and level of play oriented. You are going down one of them (not looking at results) and it will be beneficial. But why not go down both paths? Where looking or not looking arrive at the same destination and over all makes you that much of a stronger player.