Almost every poker player can understand not being results orientated at this level, because it is easy to understand. I say "almost" every player because you will still find players, particularly in the live arena, that fold AA pre flop and their reasoning for doing so will be because "they saw them get cracked twice yesterday" or something similar. This of course gives us internet geeks a good laugh at their expense. It is obviously worthy of piss-taking as folding AA pre flop for such reasons makes you a moron.
However, more poker players have a lot of difficulty not being results orientated on the medium-term level. The medium-term level could be defined as ranging from a session to say, 50k hands. It will be very rare that someone will win over a session or medium sample of hands and conclude they played terribly, and equally they will often not lose over that sample and think they played their A-game. Obviously good and bad results positively correlate with good and bad play but clearly not so strongly that good play = win and vice versa. Even the best players are very susceptible to this. I've never heard a player win a tournament and admit they played badly and got lucky, even though this will happen frequently. When Phil Ivey final tabled the WSOP Main Event I remember him saying something along the lines of "I wasn't all in for my tournament life for six days". By saying this he wishes to infer that he had reached that far in the tournament by playing very well and never risking his tournament life. Whereas in fact we know that to play a tournament for six days and never be all in with a risk of busting requires you to be EXTREMELY lucky, no matter how good you are.
The main reason we have trouble ignoring results is that we are human beings and thus programmed to see actions leading directly to results. As poker players we are constantly battling these natural tendencies and trying to just do what we know as being 'right'. Of course the problem is that what is 'right' is often not entirely understood all the time and why winning players will make different decisions in the same situation. Another problem for the poker player is that we are playing a game where we need results. We need the results (money) to buy the things we need to live like food, clothes and Tony Montana quantities of coke. There comes a time where we need to look at results and analyse how much our decisions are reflecting this. Typically, poker players do this too early.
Not being results orientated is actually useful outlook to take into 'real life'. It's amazing how many people think a decision is bad if the outcome is negative and vice versa. Football is a great example of this. Manager brings on a substitute and within two minutes the ball deflects off his arse from a corner and ends up in the goal. The commentators and pundits will then agree that the substitution was a great decision then praise the manager until the next game when a similar decision leads to a less desirable result and then proceed to slag him off.
Yesterday, I was talking to a non-poker friend about WPT Dublin and how a player who I didn't think was very good ended up coming 4th for 50k odd euros and I also mentioned how he had had some very positive results on PKR winning the masters twice in a row then finishing 3rd on the 3rd occasion. I reinforced the point that I did not think this player was very good at all and also that I should be a decent judge of a poker players ability as I have played for eight years. Despite this, my friend simply would not accept that this person wasn't a good player. "Well he must be good surely, if he won all those tournaments" he would say. I considered explaining variance in poker tournaments but gave up at this point I'm pretty sure even if he eventually ended up agreeing with me that deep down he would just believe I didn't know what I was talking about.
Anyway, this is just a mish mash of some stuff that had been going though my head and hope it is coherent enough to read. I was probably spurred to write something about results due to my frustrating performance so far in 2012. Graph:
Of all the ways of running bad I'd say running below allin expectation is the best. This is because you can actually see it and know you can't be doing too much wrong and therefore your confidence isn't dented too much. Also, it's a great way to moan!
And a quick summary of other stuff:
- WPT Dublin was a lot of fun but a losing trip for me unfortunately. I went deep but lost quite a big flip as we were approaching the bubble and couldn't recover as I lost the next three allins.
- Been watching The Killing on dvd. Great series which I highly recommend. Think Wire fans will like it.
- Spurs doing great and despite just losing to Man City (very unlucky) could still do a title tilt. Also managed to get tickets for Arsenal v Spurs game thanks to PKR which is always a great game.
- Going to APT event in London next weekend. Next blog update will be story of how I won.
