No I dont think its anything to do with mental game, I'm just not correctly adjusting to how these players arent correctly adjusting to how they should be playing multiway. I rarely struggle with mental game these days, but sometimes I will get a little tilted if I get coolered in a massive pot and I just leave.

So say a multiway SRP and someone is just betting like they have the nuts and I fold something like a decent top pair after two large bet and calls and then they check down river and some ridiculously overvalued hand takes it down.

Part of it is the adjustment from online to live play. When I started playing poker back in the moneymaker days I played a lot of live, but then I played exclusively online for a long time until recently when a poker room opened in my town. So ive been putting more hours in live the last few months. And ive been doing well, but still finding myself folding the best hand too often multiway.

Those are the best tables to be at. Just tighten way up and blast off when you get a hand. It will suck to watch a lot of action as you keep folding, but when you get a hand finally you will get paid.

Playing cookie-cutter strategy, derived from online MDA, in a live setting; letting that cookie-cutter strategy be a substitute for thinking my way through the hand.

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If it is any comfort, YanasaurBBQ, it seems to me that your problem is one that the majority of live players should aspire to have. You are beating the game, raking the fish over the coals and exploiting the regs. Are aggressive fish giving you trouble? Relax, they give everyone trouble.

Find ways of sussing out quickly which players are aggro fish. And, perhaps more importantly, accept the variance that goes with getting to showdown with them.

The underlying leak, one that all of us must cope with, is loss aversion. To win big, we must put ourselves in the way of losing big. It's going to happen now and then. If you are not getting stacked once in a while, you are doing it wrong.

AlanBostick,

I think you are hitting the nail on the head. I think it is a mental game leak that almost all winning players struggle with to various degrees. Loss aversion.

I know that the top 2 pros in my local player pool have admitted that they have played badly for exactly this reason. It's not even a strategy thing. They just have to overcome the very real human emotions that lean a lot of us towards loss aversion.

Often assume I'm being crushed by a mountain of small mistakes rather than a single big leak. But...


Having to think of "the biggest" it's almost certainly not taking time to think enough during a hand. Like I never care if someone wants to think for 30s or even 90s when someone shoves into them on the turn ... but I often act way faster than that, even if the shove is surprising.
Maybe a little results orientated, but when I think of big spots after a session it's much more common for me to think I should have done something different than decide "yeh, that was close to the best I could have played it" ... sometimes that's due to uncertainty/bad-reads where I have more information after more hands with a player, but far from always.

Second is probably not paying enough attention when I'm not in hands, so I can get those uncertain/bad reads later on when I am.

This is really true on loss aversion, to put it in practical terms:

If you're always picking off bluffs perfectly, you're not bluff catching enough
If your bluffs always get through, you're not bluffing enough
If you're always winning at show down, you're not value betting, raising or calling enough

It seems sad that, to plug leaks, you have to endure losses. It’s paradoxical that you have to lose more hands in order to win more.

Very well put, great post, thank you for that. Yes, I think loss aversion is a big part of it and I need to better embrace the variance that goes with being in hands with the aggro fish. Even if I lose more hands I should greatly increase my winrate. There are a couple bad regs, one particularly loose and bad reg that often has a monstrous stack in front of him. He's making the calls in the spots where ive been overfolding to significant aggression when villains show up with weak overplayed value. Other than that, hes super straightforward and way too loose and has little concept of theory and gets owned by other regs. But he wins a lot.

A lot of people at the table make comments about how I pause before I act every time. I make it a habit even if I know what Im going to do to pause a few seconds before I act. Theyve commented about I must be strong because of the pause and I laugh. But its something I had to consciously work on and I forget sometimes still. If Im certain im folding I dont pause for that though usually.

Its definitely hard to pay attention sometimes when not in a hand. I'll get talking to someone or be looking at stuff on my phone sometimes, but i try to make it a game to concentrate by challenging myself to correctly guess everyones hand. It helps but its still tough.