You're Not Entitled to Win

Some players feel they have a right to win. When they lose, their sense of entitlement makes them feel like victims.

They tell bad-beat stories in which they basically say, “I deserved to win because I’m a good player, had the best hand, played it well, but lost to an idiot.” Or, they whine about how some weak players are so lucky. Or, they insist that they should win tonight because they have lost so much recently. Or, they should make this flush because they have missed the last four. Or, they believe they are such good players that they deserve better results.

Are You a Victim?
We all occasionally feel that way, because poker can be so frustrating. No matter how well we understand that cards are random, no matter how much we study the theory of probability, we can’t help occasionally feeling that the law of averages has been repealed. We do everything right (or think we do), but can’t seem to win.

Feeling like a victim is a very destructive emotion. Recognizing emotions, understanding their destructive effects, and using logic to overcome them are central themes of a book that noted poker theorist David Sklansky and I just published, titled DUCY? (It stands for “Do You See Why?”) It doesn’t discuss this specific feeling, and David was not involved in writing this column, but one of our basic principles certainly applies: If you want to maximize your chances of achieving your goals, your logical brain must usually dominate your feelings and control your actions.

What Should You Do?
To stop feeling and acting like a victim, take several steps. First, understand and accept that this feeling is caused primarily by your own psychological weaknesses, not by what other people or the “poker gods” do. If you deny that reality, you will feel and play like a victim. Since victims rarely play well, you’ll get bad results, which will increase your feelings and their negative effects. You can’t break this destructive cycle without accepting responsibility for your feelings and results.

Second, increase your self-understanding by answering four questions:
1. How often do you feel like a victim?
2. When does that feeling occur?
3. How do you express it?
4. How does it affect your play?

*1. How often do you feel like a victim? * If you rarely feel that way, don’t worry about it and focus on more important problems. If you feel victimized nearly every time you play poker, recognize that you have a serious psychological problem. Your problem is not that you’re getting worse results than you deserve; it’s that you expect too much.

If you often feel this way when you’re not playing poker, your problem is even more severe. First, your emotion is essentially unrelated to situational factors such as bad beats. Therefore, your ego is so fragile that you constantly make excuses to protect it.

Second, the more often you feel victimized and the stronger your feeling is, the worse effects it will have. In addition to costing you money at the tables, it will damage more important things, such as your career or personal relationships. Nobody wants to be around self-pitying victims (except the people who exploit them).

Obviously, the more serious your problem is, the more you gain by solving it. Unfortunately, most people’s minds don’t work that way. They deny problems because they don’t want to face them, and the more serious the problems are, the stronger the denial becomes.

Feeling victimized protects their egos. Instead of facing up to the fact that they don’t play that well, they blame others for their results. The only way out is to examine your feelings objectively. Fight your natural defensiveness by asking all of these questions and, if necessary, getting feedback from trusted friends.

2. When does that feeling occur? If you identify the specific situations that create this feeling, you’re more likely to take appropriate corrective actions. For example, if bad beats really upset you, don’t play in very loose games. If a low (or negative) win rate greatly bothers you, don’t play against tough players.

When I make such recommendations, many people object: “But I want to play against loose players. The pots are bigger, it’s more fun, and I win more money.” The only answer I can give them is, “Then stop whining about bad beats. In loose games, they are inevitable.”

Or, they say, “I love the challenge of playing against tough players and want to develop my skills.” So, I tell them, “Those are desirable objectives, but you must accept that reducing your immediate profits is inevitable. Just regard it as tuition, and spend enough time in softer games to increase your win rate to an acceptable level.”

In other words, understand and accept reality instead of expecting to get everything you want and feeling cheated when you don’t get it.

3. How do you express it? The less directly and frequently that you express your frustration, the less destructive it will be. Unfortunately, many people can’t control themselves. They repeatedly complain about other players, dealers, and bad luck. Whining reinforces this feeling, weakens their image, and causes opponents to play better against them.

No matter how frustrated you are, keep quiet. If you must express your feelings, wait until you’re away from the table and tell only trusted people.

Warning: Many people think, “I was steaming, but nobody could see it.” They’re wrong. Their tougher opponents recognize and exploit their emotions. Don’t assume that you’re hiding your emotions. Ask a friend if he can tell when you’re feeling angry or sorry for yourself.

4. How does it affect your play? Many players say, “I was really upset, but played exactly the way that I always do.” Nonsense! Emotions nearly always affect the way that you think and play, and the stronger the emotions, the greater their effects will be.

We all have seen people deny that they were on tilt when everyone at the table knew it. Denial is much more common when the emotions and reactions are subtler. For example, if you’re mildly upset, you’ll be a bit distracted and will miss signals or misinterpret them.

Barry Tanenbaum recently wrote a series of Card Player columns titled “‘Easy’ Things to Do to Win at Poker.” It included paying more attention, counting the pot, computing the odds, and many others. I asked him, “Why did you put ‘easy’ in quotation marks?”

He replied, “Because these things may look simple, but hardly anyone does them all the time, and most players rarely do many of them.” He could have added that players are especially unlikely to do them when they are upset. And, if you won’t do the “easy” things, you certainly won’t do the difficult ones.

What’s the Bottom Line?
You can’t help occasionally feeling like a victim, and you shouldn’t deny it. Denial just prevents you from coping well. The more often this feeling occurs, the more ruthlessly honest you must be, and the harder you must work to control your feeling’s effects. Constantly monitor yourself, look for signs that you’re getting emotional, and do whatever it takes to reduce those feelings and their effects.

Dr. Schoonmaker, alan[email protected], is the author of four poker books: The Psychology of Poker, Your Worst Poker Enemy, Your Best Poker Friend, and Poker Winners Are Different._