It has always been my belief since I started playing this game seriously that your attitude is often the deciding factor between success and failure. In previous articles, I have discussed how routine, preparation, and being realistic can positively effect your game. In this article, I would like to focus on overall attitude when it comes to professional gambling.

Poker is a game that naturally breeds negativity in many people. If you are a cash game player and are winning 60% of your sessions, you are a good player most likely, but that still means four days out of ten you are going to have to put a negative number in your records. If you’re a tournament player, you will have even fewer positive sessions and can go weeks or months at a time without a huge score.

Many people are not prepared for this when they start playing poker full-time. They approach poker the same way they approach much of the rest of their life. In school, we are taught we are supposed to succeed every time we put effort into something. An A student is often not allowed more than one botched paper or mediocre test grade. If you played sports growing up, you were probably taught that one loss is a huge deal. If you work a real job, failures are seldom tolerated. You have to be at work on-time every day, and every task needs to be completed on time.

If you approach poker with this same mindset, you will ultimately be aggravated most of the time you are playing. Believing you are a loser because a large portion of your sessions land you in the red causes you to approach the game with a loser’s attitude. If you believe a disaster is right around the corner, it is easy to stop applying pressure in hands because you just knoooow the guy is going to outdraw you, so why even bother? You might do the opposite and start overbetting your hands to protect against draws, thus losing value. You might bet “to protect your hand” when a draw was very unlikely and a slowplay might have afforded you a big pot. One thing I have been doing recently that has cost me probably thousands is gambling too much near the end of MTTs, which I believe is a result of my usual game not yielding results for a while.

If you look at the people that are very successful in this game, they do not adopt any of the attitudes I have described. They find a way to balance being insanely competitive during the session and a c’est la vie attitude afterward. They realize poker is more like investing than it is a sport. Even if they play their best, they are going to be losing a good proportion of the time, but their winning sessions will pay for their losing sessions. If they are tournament players, they realize 99% of the time they enter a tournament they are not going to win, but the one win is going to pay for all of their washouts.

I am not that great of a poker player. The strength I have had since I started playing is that while I do not have the greatest ROI in any game I participate in, I can often play more hours than many of the people I compete with. This allows me to make more money than most people I compete against, even though many of them are far more talented than I am. I do not tilt as easily as most people, which allows me to play solid poker for longer hours. If I do become upset, I just quit playing. I vent to a few people who are also professional gamblers and understand the tribulations, and I only come back when I feel like I have my head on straight.

The reason I am able to do this is not because I am some amazingly mature individual; I get emotional about a number of stupid things like any other teenager. I just think about poker differently than most people. I do not get down on myself every time I lose, nor do I praise myself when I win. I view poker more like investing, and that has helped me deal with the many down cycles.

If I were to walk up to you and say, “Hey lets play a game. Let’s flip this coin, and every time it comes up heads I’ll pay you two hundred dollars, and every time it comes up tails you pay me a hundred,” would you ever want me to leave? Hell no, you would do everything in your power to keep me there. You would buy my meals, act like you were my best friend, and engage in every style of ass-kissing.

Obviously poker is more complex, but if you’re playing a solid game, this is all that is taking place. When you give the guy bad odds to catch a flush draw and he still calls you, then this is what is happening. When some MTT lagtard has way too wide a reraising range and you are taking advantage of it, this is all that is going on. Just like you shouldn’t care if in our hypothetical “I hit a string of tails” situation, you shouldn’t care if the maniac woke up with a hand or hit a two-outer.

Many people understand this about poker, but they revert to another attitude entirely when they are playing. Leaderboards, media coverage, and our own competitive desires give us the illusion that poker is a game like any other, when that is far from the truth.

If tomorrow you and I decide to start playing chess games every morning, studying games played between the best players and reading books on the game, then in a month we will without a doubt win more chess games. However, if tomorrow you and I started playing ten hours of poker a day, studying Cardrunners and PXF videos every night and discussing hands every night, then in a month we might still be losing poker players. It is less likely, but in any given session a four-year-old could beat us.

You shouldn’t even care about a losing session. All you are doing is letting these players win once in a while. If these guys never won, they wouldn’t play with you anymore. They would go back to the roulette table and start giving Harrah’s the money that should have been yours.

If I were able to give you stock in Google when they were an upstart, knowing what the price of their stock was eventually going to be, would you bail and sell the first time they had a negative week? If you ran the Bellagio, would you freak out because some high roller came in and had a hot night at the craps table? No, because you know in the long run this guy is going to lose everything he has to you.

The truth is, you and I need these guys to win once in a while. We lost a lot of people because of the new legislation and Neteller shutting down. We need Joe Schmoe who works a 9-to-5 to win a tournament once in a while, so he can go tell his friends at the home game how much he made last night at X site, so they will play with us tomorrow.

Furthermore, I don’t understand berating these players at all. If you can’t handle somebody running A-10 through your K-K once in a while, you are in the wrong job. No Limit Hold’em (and tournaments especially) are some of the most variance-ridden forms of poker there are. Hold’em is popular for the reason that it helps recreational players so much through the way it is structured. Hold’em starts with you only getting two cards out of seven. In tournaments, all the betting often happens at that point, and your opponent gets five new cards to catch up to you. You are never that big of a favorite, and in a tournament, you only need one hand to get cracked to knock you out.

It amazes me to talk to players daily who seem to take individual tournament outcomes like they’re the be all and end all of their lives. If you want a nice tidy ego boost, go play checkers. No one will care, you won’t make any money at it, but you’ll never ever have to deal with the amazing adversity that is not being able to win every single time you play.

But do you want to win every time you play or do you want the money? Do you want to stop living paycheck to paycheck? Do you want to move out of the one-bedroom and into the penthouse? Do you want to stop going on vacations to your local lake for four days and instead start going on treks to Ibiza or Thailand? Do you want to buy Cristal like its water? Do you want to help your family out financially when times get tough, or tell your girlfriend that you’re taking her wherever she wants to go tonight?

If you want all that, you have to learn how to take things as they come in this game and be tough throughout the downwings. When you’re losing in poker, you need to stop looking at it as the quarterback screwing up the game-winning pass. You are simply the pool hustler letting a game go before you up the bet.

You are in control as long as you believe you are. The only person who can cause you to lose control is you. Stick to your game, keep learning, have some good friends, and weather the downswings. Look at this thing long-term and realistically, and you will do all right.

Good luck to all of you.

-Alex