I Won!

Well, that feels like a long time coming. I just won my first live tournament since February of 2008. It was a small field and a smallish buy-in, the $570 pot-limit Big O tournament at the Commerce Poker Series in September. There were 33 runners and a first-place prize of $8,200.
Details out of the way, let me tell you that this is not a brag post. Far from it. Going nine years without winning a tournament is a tough go, even for someone who only plays 20-30 tournaments in most years. I would have, of course, been happier with a second- or third-place finish in the other tournament I played that day, the $1,100 buy-in main event as they would have gotten me much closer to clearing my make up. The win was somehow worth more than money to me though, because I’m not sure I would have taken sixth place in that tournament for $33,560 over my result from that Friday.
Why should winning mean so much when it comes with less money? The short answer is that it shouldn’t. If you had asked me in 2008, when I was winning big tournaments pretty easily, I surely would have told you that I’d gladly take a second place that had more money attached to it than a lower-paying first place. It’s only logical. Even today, if you said that I could have a second place that cleared my makeup over a first that didn’t I’d definitely take that. But it still means something to me.
I was still giddy to take a winner’s picture. I was still excited to take home a trophy from the Commerce after so many close calls. I was still considering waking up my wife and kids to tell them the good news. I was still wide awake and unable to sleep when I got home even though it was 4 a.m. and I had to be up to help with the kids in a few hours. It wasn’t very much money. By my count, it was the 28th-biggest cash I’ve had in a live poker tournament. Heck, I’ve even swapped or bought pieces of other players that were worth more than this win of my own.
It just feels good. And I can’t tell you if that’s why I’ve been having more fun playing poker lately or if it’s the other way around. I know that if we were all robots, it wouldn’t matter who is the one that’s running well lately. That wouldn’t register on the results at all. But it does. We are emotional creatures with psychological flaws and the fact that we’re running well and winning lately leads to better play in most cases.
There are definitely people who have the opposite problem and when they’re winning start to play looser and gamble more than when they’re losing. I’m not one of those players. I don’t think to myself “I’ve been running so well lately I can make this bad call and it will still work out in my favor.” I do tend to have more confidence in my decisions and a better clarity of thought. I don’t tend to think (Like I do sometimes when I’m running poorly) “Well, I’m sure my freeroll won’t get there,” or “Of course, their freeroll is going to hit.”
I instead just concentrate on making good decisions and letting the money flow from there. I tend to stay in better games and leave the worse ones. It just, for whatever reason actually makes a difference and I know that’s something I need to work on. I need to be more mentally prepared to handle the swings of poker with my outlook. It has to be the same approach whether my last hand or hour or day or week or month or quarter was full of good results or bad ones. Because those results are all in the past. They have no bearing on how the next one will go, even when it feels so much like they do.
I remember, after winning a World Poker Tour event at Borgata in 2008 and busting Justin Bonomo in eighth place, that I read a post by Justin about our relative results in poker tournaments up to that point. He was lamenting the fact that he had run deep so many times and couldn’t seem to find a win no matter what he did while I had a similar number of deep runs as him and had three major wins. Having been in possession of those three belts, I couldn’t empathize with Justin. I certainly didn’t think it was because I was a better no-limit hold’em player than him. I know I wasn’t at the time and am not currently. His results since then have shown that to be true, having won plenty of trophies himself. What it really illustrated to me, and something that I had lost sight of somewhere along the way, is the incredible amount of luck it takes to win a poker tournament, even one with a small field.
Since that win in 2008, I have a 12th, a ninth, two sixths, a fourth, four thirds, and two seconds. I had no seconds and only one third before that. Close misses all of them, and I didn’t play any better or worse in this recent tournament than I did in those. I made mistakes and good plays in all of them. It’s just that in this one, things worked out in my favor.
The point is this: Yes, skill is a big factor in how well you do in tournaments or poker in general. But, you can be a very good player and not see good results for a long time. That’s not the important part. The important part is to make sure that your process that leads to good results is functioning well and not wavering because of previous bad luck or bad play. That’s how you’ll really know you’ve won. ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG