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Posted by MaxApr 13
One of my biggest goals while playing poker, a goal that I document often throughout this blog, is to be able to play poker and have my hours put in, level of studying, and level of play be unaffected by the results of poker. For a minute today, I felt like I had a moment where this was the case. But I was wrong, sort of.
I saw Imper1um sitting at 5ks today and, having player him before, sat thinking I had a pretty significant edge. And as I played him I saw that edge come out, I got it in good against him several times and when I didn’t, I was pretty certain my play in the hand was good if not great. Sadly, I ended up down about 23k against him. And when he finally declined our last sng, I stayed seated for a second and absorbed the moment. I felt great. And for a minute I thought wow maybe I am starting to get it.
But then I realized a couple things. 1) Throughout the session it would be clear to anyone watching that I played well and 2) I had won a couple sngs at the end. What I realized was that although I was happy despite the monetary results, I think I would have been angry if it went a different way even if my level of play was the same. Let’s say I played 1 sng with Imper1um, and going in I felt like he was the type of player to fold to overbets. I get into a spot that seems like a good spot to overbet bluff, and I do. However he times down and calls me with middle pair. Did I play any worse in this scenario? No, but I would have felt worse.
I hope to see one day in my future where I play a 6 straight hours of poker, lose 20k, run bad, get it in bad, and have several hands where I get outplayed. When that session happens, and I sit for a minute afterwards and realize I still feel great about game, I’ll know that I’m getting somewhere.
4 comments
Comment by Andy on April 14, 2011 at 8:05 am
Dark sides of setting goals.
Max I believe you take too much confrontational aproach to your mental game.
Yuo try to accomplish goals which can push you in the the opposite direction.
“I’m going to play 400 hu sngs from the 100-1k level, no matter what my results are.”
LOL.This is punishment.
“3) If I feel like I’m tilting, I must play for 1 hour more from the moment I become aware of it.”
This another example of punishment.
Let’s anaylyze your goals and translate into psychological concepts.
You are on tilt and you are try reprocess more info for longer time.LOL
You try to push more info , when your brain is already overwhelmed(dysfunctional) and not able to (quality)process standart amount of info.
In my opinion you need to use rewards rather than punishments to control your tilt as long term strategy.
But maybe I am wrong.Maybe you are building your mental muscle by pushing yourself when you’re tilted.
Quitting is easy. Push yourself and you get over the hump, and then tilts gets easy.GL.
“Journal on every break” is good move.You need much more introspection into your mental process and more logic injection regardless of your tilt-strategy.
Comment by HokieGreg on April 14, 2011 at 8:44 pm
trying to continue to play well when tilted puts you under a lot of pressure. pressure exposes weakness. max is honest enough with himself to realize those weaknesses and learn from them. you will never get the best out of yourself in this game by quitting every time you get a little stressed and never challenging yourself. imo.
hokie
Comment by Danny on April 14, 2011 at 9:01 pm
I think Andy has a great point. I think you and me both push ourselves way too hard sometimes, and I think that can be part of the problem.
On the same note, I think your goal is a good one. I realized something cool yesterday: If you are a winning player, everytime you lose at the poker table is bad variance. This can be bad emotional variance, bad thought process approximation variance, bad situational variance, or any of the typical variance people talk about. It’s simple, but it’s true.
Comment by Andy on April 14, 2011 at 10:52 pm
I meant the possibility that maybe you try too hard-maybe not.I am not poker pro.
Reading your blog I recall my “misguided” efforts and perception how to defeat tilt and control my emotions.
I feel I made huge progress not by pushing hard(hours times tables).
I tried hard to comprehend my emotions and complex relationships among them.
The comprehension translated into sensivity to sense tiny variations between my emotions.
With time I became more sensitive to my opponent emotions too -better interpretation of timing and sizing tells,etc.
My emotions started evolving over time – I became both less tilted by loses and (suprise)much less happy with my wins.
Today I tilted at pokertable but I realize clearly it was just trigger.The reason was not related to poker at all.I accepted and tried to analyze the relationships between the reason and the trigger.