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Stop Moaning & Start Thinking
By Annie Duke
A friend of mine told me of a hand that knocked him out of a tournament recently. He had Ac Kc against 8-8. The flop came a king and the guy rivered an 8. My friend bemoaned that he’d lost the tournament to a guy who was over a 20:1 underdog. “Wow, that’s really unlucky!” I sympathized. I felt really horrible that he’d gotten knocked out on such a long shot. Bad Beat, right?
The problem came when I saw the tournament on TV it turned out that all the money had gone in before the flop. That means the hand was a race; basically, each hand was even money to win. Granted, the order in which the cards fell is painful. It’s always hard to have your hopes raised so high, only to have them dashed when the river takes the tournament away from you.
But the fact is that when the money goes in before the flop, it is a five-card hand. Five cards are going to hit the board and the order in which they land is, frankly, irrelevant.
Why do I bring this up? Does it really matter if my friend wants to tell people he lost to a 20:1 shot instead of an even money shot? Yes, it really does. Critical thinking is one of the most important aspects of being a good player. This includes looking with a critical eye at every session of poker we play and not allowing our emotions to get involved in our evaluation our game.
Bemoaning your bad beats is terribly unproductive. In poker there is an element of chance. That’s a plain fact. Sometimes the vagaries of statistics bite you and a big favorite will lose. Your opponent may only have a 5% chance of winning a pot but, guess what? That 5% is going to hit 5% of the time, and sometimes it will be in a crucial situation. I know it is not fun, but it happens to all of us. Obsessing about bad luck and, in the case of my friend, rewriting history to make yourself appear more unfortunate, is counterproductive. Pondering your ill fate takes you out of the game. It makes you feel like a loser. It undermines your confidence and, as a true competitor, you always need to play with supreme confidence. You need to feel like a winner at all times.
Rather than focus on bad luck, you should always focus on the way you played your hand. Perhaps you could have played it differently and avoided the bad situation. My friend moved in before the flop. Wouldn’t it be more productive to explore the possibility of a flat call before the flop and a move-in after the flop when a king hit the board? I am not saying this is the right play, but exploring it as a possibility is certainly more productive than simply moaning about the loss. The fact is that I probably would have moved in pre-flop in the situation he was in also, in which case you just shrug your shoulders at losing the race. But a flat call certainly would have won the pot, so it is worth exploring the option.
You should not only explore the hands you lose; sometimes we play hands we win poorly. Focusing on the win or loss itself is not worth it and will undermine your ability to improve your game. Focusing, instead, on the play of the hand – well now you have my attention. That is the fastest road to improvement.
As players, we all have a tendency to overemphasize skill when we are winning, and bad luck when we are losing. Don’t wallow in your bad luck when you are running poorly. Instead, take a good hard look at how you could have played differently. Sometimes you will find you just got unlucky. Other times you will find that you made mistakes and are the architect of your own misfortune. Likewise, don’t celebrate your skill when you are winning. That is just as bad as wallowing in your bad luck. Take a cold hard look at how much of your good streak is down to you playing well, and how much it is just things mathematically going your way. Often you will find that you were playing just as well when losing as winning. The difference is that you’ll win all your 50/50 shots on a winning streak and lose them on the losing streak.
Remember, poker is a game that requires us all to be honest with ourselves. That kind of honesty is challenging in both our personal lives and our professional lives. But, particularly in poker, the kind of cold-hearted evaluation that eliminates emotional involvement in the outcome is supremely important to our growth as expert players.
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