The sessions where you seem unable to stop hitting boats are the easy ones. And generally, I tend not to learn that much from them.

The sessions where you grind it out for 8 hours, play the best poker of your life, make massive laydown after massive laydown, and in the end you barely break even pose the real challenge, and are the ones I learn from.

Now granted, I'm a microstakes grinder so over-folding is definitely more +ev than at other stake levels.

However, as I've minimized my tilt and improved my game, one thing has become abundantly clear: Players aren't bluffing nearly the amount that I originally thought when I first started playing, and folding is the best option the majority of the time.

By this, I mean that if a player has already raised you twice on the river, and he does it a third time, the chances are that he just has had it each time.

Did you just see a maniac player shove all in preflop with 74o, and now he raises you when the A hits on the turn? A lot of the time he has the A and we should fold anyway regardless of his image.

And speaking of shoving preflop, if the player who just sat down to your left makes a crazy all in shove after you've made a standard 3x open with JJ, most of the time he's not making a move and the correct play is to give him credit and throw it away.

What I've noticed as I play more of these sessions where the theme more seems to be of minimizing losses than winning, is that I start to get nervous. It's like an anxiety that builds as I make folds, and in so doing never really know for 100% if it was the right play, since obviously when you fold you don't see your opponents cards. And, it doesn't matter if I know strategically without a doubt that the fold was correct. The fact that you don't get to see what they had when you fold just starts to get to me.

Like this unknown feeling of hmmm, I guess I'll never really know 100% if that was correct.

In the past, this resulted in tilt where I would spew off a buy in on a dumb call or a dumb shove thinking "he can't have it every time, right?" And while every once in a while I still make a play like this, overall I've minimized this tilt to the level that maybe instead of going all in, I just make a small hero call instead of folding.

But now, even in these sessions when I don't tilt at all, or even in some winning sessions, there still is this feeling that comes on and builds the more times I make correct laydowns. I don't know what this is. I called it existential anxiety in the title, but maybe that's not correct.

Is there a way to deal with this? It's probably somewhat normal I would think.

It isn't existential anxiety, it's just the normal human desire to know. So it's more like epistemic anxiety. We don't like uncertainty, particularly when we make decisions. We just have to know if we were correct. So we call more often than we should. We lose money but at least we've relieved the epistemic anxiety.

What you have to do is let go of the result and focus on the process. It doesn't actually matter what your opponent was holding because we make our decisions based on ranges, and all that matters is whether you made the best decision based on those ranges. The right decision is the one that maximizes your ev based on the information you have at the time, not the one that would have maximized your ev based on the opponent's actual hand.

I just think about what he represents and if I don't get it, I am going to do some calling, like the GTO calling or less. You don't have to call or fold every time to satisfy your healthy curiosity.

Skimmed first couple sentences. It seems like you're a nit. Not every fold is a "massive laydown". You're probably being steamrolled by LAGs. Learn to bluffcatch. Also, not every turn and river check-raise is the nuts. We know when you're pot controlling/taking a bet-fold line and we own small capped range value bets on the big money streets. Keep playing 18/16 though. Sweet sweet blinds and fold to cbet money for me!

I play at Ignition where everyone is anonymous. This protects me a lot from HUD users but the hand histories are the best: They show EVERYONE'S hole cards, even if they folded. It takes 24 hours for the hand histories to be ready so I just keep notes. When someone 3 bets me off a pot 24 hours later I can see what they had. You were right in your assessment... they almost always have it.

Yes, I was thinking of purchasing that software to convert Ignition hands.

Agree. There's no too much we can do under this texture. Just focus and try to avoid tilt.

We must work hard to get our goals. Discipline is what we get while playing this great game during lots of years.

really bad advice at almost any stake, esp micros

In my experience in 1/2 there are players with a high bluff frequency but they're rare. Anonymous micros are something i don't know about but for the most part at 1/2 they are not reraise bluffing the river. That I can say 90%+. I'm not that curious with a flush on a paired board when i have to blocker bet/fold river. Obviously, it doesn't happen that much.

Yup ... uncertainty is the villain. And it sounds like OP's perception of the game may be a little skewed (from watching tournament final tables on TV, perhaps?). No run-of-the-mill players aren't bluffing that much, when they raise it is serious shyt, you have to base someone's aggression on what they are doing right now not on "the odds they have it again" type thinking. I saw a guy doing this last thing one night recently at the table. He played 6 or 8 big pots with a tight player, paying off post-flop raises for his small stack repeatedly ... failing to realize that when the guy raises he's there, instead thinking well he cant have so many hands ... as if the function of the opponents raising was random instead of simply being there. He was verbalizing his whole thinking process after each loss. I found it amazing. I've seen it before. Skewed. As in, "when the tight/solid player raises he's there" is not the thought pattern, but some kind of "what are the odds that he can keep being there he must be bluffing X amount of the time" is the thought pattern. Hell, THE RAISE MEANS HE'S THERE WITH THIS STYLE PLAYER: there is no more to it.