Every time you sit at the poker table you can win or you can lose. What makes the difference?
Factor one – variance. When you move all-in preflop with Pocket Aces in NL Holdem and lose the hand, you are face to face with Her Royal Highness Variance. Variance is the mathematical certainty that even when you have the best hand, you will, sometimes, lose. What can we do about this? Nothing. So accept it – in fact, embrace it, variance exists. Also, If weaker players would not win sometimes they would very quickly give up. Would you step into a boxing ring with a world champion fighter if every time you did you got beat up? How about if you won 4 out of 10 times? Perhaps you might start to think about it? This is what makes the games profitable. Do not let your experience of being on the wrong side of variance impact the quality of your play. Over time the best players will always win.
Factor two – how well you play, the quality of your game. You can play at your best or you can play below your best (in poker we call this playing outside of your A-game). If you were to plot the performance of your game over a large enough sample size, it would inevitably look something like this:
There are many factors aside from your technical poker skill that contribute to the quality of your game:
- Your focus
- Your motivation
- How aware you are of your own weaknesses
- The extent to which distracting factors influence you and many other factors besides.
Poker Warm-Up is a web-based application that allows poker players to create a well-structured and individual poker warm-up routine which prepares them to perform at the top of their poker abilities. Nobody can play their A-game all the time, but by warming up you can increase the likelihood will start your session in the right mindset and more often, while at the same time minimizing the chance that your terrible C-game occur! Another benefit of warming up and playing your best game is that learning in poker becomes a much easier and smoother process.
December 24, 2018
awesome post