The Poker Mindset – Attitude #2

The Poker Mindset is a set of seven attitudes that every poker player should try to master, regardless of their game, limits, or technical skill. They are realities to be aware of and attitudes to adopt to succeed at poker over the long term.

Just like technical skills, the Poker Mindset will help you make better decisions at the table. In fact, in some situations it could be argued that defects in your Poker Mindset could lose you more money than defects in your technical game.

This is the second article of a series where we will examine each of the seven attitudes of the Poker Mindset. It includes excerpts from my book, coauthored with Ian Taylor, The Poker Mindset.

Attitude #2: Play for the Long Term

Our first attitude was Understand and Accept the Realities of Poker. In that article we discussed The Five Realities of Poker, which included “In the short term, luck is king” and “In the long term, skill is king.” It should be easy to see that there is little point in playing poker with the expectation of making money in the short term. In the short term, pretty much anything can happen; bad players can win and good players can lose.

If you are looking to make money from poker, you need to play for the long term and accept the short-term risks.

The second attitude of the Poker Mindset is to play for the long term. But what exactly do we mean by “playing for the long term?” First of all, it is important to note that we are not talking about playing differently. There is a “correct” way to play every hand; the way that, on average, will win you the most money. Your aim should be to play every hand that way. In fact, you need to be mentally playing for the long term because concentrating on short-term results can leave you vulnerable to making plays that have a lower expected value. If you are playing for the long term, you will not really care about the results of one session, and especially not one hand. When you are playing for the long term, you are satisfied with making the plays that will make you a long-term winner regardless of your short-term results.

A player who puts too much emphasis on his short-term results will feel ecstatic after a good winning session and depressed after a losing one. He will also be prone to the following errors:

Playing to Get Even

Players who focus on the short term will do anything possible to avoid a losing session. If they are stuck, they will be inclined to keep playing until they are at least even. This attitude can have catastrophic results.

First, they may continue to play when tired or bored, resulting in them not playing their best. Second, this attitude may cause them to go on tilt, especially if they slip even further into the red, making them doubly depressed. Of course, once they are on tilt, this is likely to cause them to lose even more, and they become more determined to get at least some of it back. As you can see, the result is a rather dangerous and vicious circle.

Protecting a Win

The reverse is also true. Short-term players love to record a winning session and will tend to over-value them. A popular saying among casual gamblers is “Quit while you’re ahead,” which comes in part from the depressing feeling of being ahead and then losing all your winnings again.

One of the worst possible scenarios for a short-term player is losing his winnings, even if he loses it playing good poker. He will tend to quit while he is ahead, even if he is in a very good game and is playing well.

Alternatively, a short-term player might do something that could be even worse. He might stay in the game but start to play very conservatively, turning down plays with positive expected value in order to make plays that give him the lowest chance of losing a large amount of money.

Tilting

A player more concerned with results than with playing well is far more likely to go on tilt because he will be affected more when things go badly.

Getting Mad at Bad Players

A player concerned with short-term results will be very annoyed when he is beaten by a bad play made by one of his opponents. He considers the results of his individual
sessions important, and so any time he loses a pot he thinks he should have won, especially a large one, it hurts. This may cause him to hold a grudge against the player who made the bad play and he might even begin to play hands he shouldn’t when his nemesis is in the pot. Alternatively, he may berate the weak player, which is always a bad idea, as the bad player may leave the table or at least start playing better. A player mad at losing a pot from an opponent’s bad play is at risk of playing badly himself trying to recover the money he lost on the pot.

Making Rash Changes to His Game

By playing for the long term, you are acknowledging that you can lose money in the short term through no fault of your own. On the other hand, a player concerned with the short term will instinctively try to change things if results are not going his way. While it is a good idea to continually review your play and make changes accordingly, it is a bad idea to make changes on the basis of short-term results. Note that this is a common error among intermediate players. When they are experiencing a run of poor results, they will constantly tinker with their game in an attempt to improve their results, not understanding (or not accepting) that their losses are mainly due to short-term luck.

In summary, playing for the long term really is the only way to play poker successfully. Players fixated on short-term results generally suffer unwarranted mental anguish that can result in bad decision making at the table.

Next month we’ll look at the third attitude of the Poker Mindset — Emphasize Correct Decisions over Making Money. ♠

Matthew is the owner of Dimat Enterprises, “Publishing Today’s Best Poker Books” and is a coauthor with Ian Taylor of The Poker Mindset, available at Kindle, Amazon, and pokerbooks.InternetTexasHoldem.com in both print and PDF format.