It's How You Set Your Sails

This column is a letter sent to me by a friend of mine, Phil "Doc" Earle. Doc is a very good poker player, is of high intellect, philosophical, and somewhat eccentric, and has made mistakes along the journey of life that many of us have made. Allow me to share his letter and some of his philosophy with you. Here's his letter:

To be a successful poker player, you have to understand and master the three most important aspects of the game: skill, discipline, and luck.

Skill involves obvious things such as knowing hand and money odds, knowing the game, the players, and how to isolate them in a hand, and knowing how to use your stack size and table position to your advantage.

Discipline is perhaps the most difficult thing to master because it involves seeing, understanding, and correcting flaws within your own psyche. The majority of the time, hand results will go against you. These negative results may be intermittent or sporadic, or for prolonged periods of time. The best poker players understand this. They adjust and handle what the game presents them with patience.

Discipline also includes other aspects of your behavior away from poker. For example, if you go to Las Vegas to play in a major poker tournament such as the World Series of Poker, you should play in only your best game. If you are a no-limit and pot-limit poker player, don't play stud, high-low split, lowball, or limit games. And, of course, don't overdo it on sports betting or other casino games. This will further "mess" with your mind and destroy the essential focus that is necessary to give you the best chance to win in your best game.

How do I know all of these things to be true? Because no one has committed more of these mistakes than I.

You may think luck cannot be mastered – that is, you cannot control the outcome of chance events. That is true. You can, however, control its effect on you. If you become angry over bad beats or a bad run of cards, you have allowed a very real aspect of the game of poker to control you. The same is true if you allow yourself to have a negative or defeatist attitude: "I never win a pot." Your character is your luck.

Winning can also control you if you fall victim to arrogance or an inflation of your own ability, image, and/or ego.

Allowing any of these inner emotions to control you will cloud your accurate assessment of the game and hand situations. The best poker players handle all of these situations with levelheaded maturity. They are the ones at the table who display "character and class." No matter what happens in the game, they never seem to gloat or exhibit an outburst of temper.

If you ask any of the top poker players in the world, "Which is more important, winning and losing or making the right decisions?" all of them will respond the latter. If you make correct decisions, winning will take care of itself.

Old seamen used to say, "'Tis not the gales but the set of your sails that determines the way you go." This is most befitting of poker, too, since the way you "set" your character at the table has a large impact on your overall results in poker.

Thanks, Doc, for sharing some insights that we all can use.

It's not how the wind blows, but how you set your sails that counts.

Take care.

Mike Sexton is the host of PartyPoker.com and a commentator on the World Poker Tour (which can be seen every Wednesday on the Travel Channel).