Poker Articles

To begin with a cliché: one of the many essential qualities of winning poker players is the ability to deceive their opponents. Unfortunately this game also affords many opportunities for self-deception. Here are a few ways in which you may have bluffing yourself:

Before every session, ask yourself if you feel fresh and alert. I have convinced myself to play many tournaments I knew deep down I didn’t feel up for. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to play with focus, intensity and feel. After playing poorly, that little voice that told me not to play in the first place compounds any self-directed anger. If you simply make an excuse for why you didn’t play well instead of looking at all of the possible reasons for failure, you will never truly know all of the factors that contribute to your success. Knowing these factors will help you immensely, because they are often the most easily repeatable and completely self-reliant. Perhaps you really do play better when you don’t get wasted the night before (or even during a session).

Let’s say you just busted from a tournament when your AA failed to hold against K8 all-in-preflop. Sigh. Another bad beat (so typical how you run, right?). For many players in this situation, they will blame their entire tournament loss on this single hand when there are probably a number of ways they could have accumulated more chips. Further, for players who nit themselves down to a micro-stack waiting for a premium hand, they make a particularly egregious error in MTT play by assuming that they can always wait to get their money in ahead. If these players had been pressing earlier to stay afloat, they would additionally have been able to get more value out of that premium because their double up would be that much bigger. In this example, one can either tell a bad beat story or take personal responsibility and vow never to willingly give away a tournament player’s most precious lifeline: fold equity. Clouding the perception of your loss in a bad beat story instead of taking calculated but necessary risks is another way I have seen players lie to themselves.

Don’t inflate your wins and downplay your losses. You can’t lie to yourself about your results if you keep perfect tabs on your play. If you always brag to your friends every time you win a tournament but never let them know that you occasionally don’t win first place, they will never feel bad asking you to get the tab at the end of the night. As well, you will better be able to understand your strengths and weaknesses with long term data on your results. For example, in 2006 I played ~600 poker tournaments. So far in 2007 I have only played 250 (on pace to play about half as many for the year), and I have made approximately half as much money. When I realized this, I stopped beating myself up for not having as strong results, realizing that I simply needed to play more.

Don’t lie about your abilities. The 2nd time I ever took a shot at a major tournament was with a 5k roll in the Sunday 125k on UB (this was something I didn’t plan on repeating, so this isn’t advice to consistently play over your head or your roll). I had won two tournaments in the last few weeks and was feeling on top of my game, not to mention the world. To make a long story short, I got very lucky in a couple spots in the mid-stages and went on to take 2nd. At this moment, with a windfall of cash and a handful of strong results, I could have very easily lied to myself, mentally banking on these results as proof of my dominance in online poker. But in the end, I simply knew that my game needed a lot of work (and of course it still does). Submitting to the pressure of honesty will allow you to see your game for what it is, and hopefully what it eventually needs to be.