You Must Feel Pain When Playing Poker – This Is Why

If you are like most poker players, you have felt legitimate pain while playing games. Such pain is usually caused by bad luck, which can come in various forms: Get money as a favorite and lose; Has a long line of unfavorable results without our own errors; or (even smoother) Run to the top of our opponent’s range. Poker is full of painful instances but also completely out of our control. Identifying them may sometimes be rather complicated – especially to think players who hate using good luck as a reason for their mistakes – but we all know there. One lesson we can learn from this is that: the faster we identify examples that are beyond our control, the faster we can start working to accept it.

Talking about the stone wall, when I was little, my mother used to tell me that there were two types of problems / challenges: those we could improve and that we couldn’t fix. It sounds very stoik and all, but how does someone decide which one?

• Should I enter more time in my business that failed?
• Is my partnership that disabled still makes sense?
• Should I continue to repair my old car or give up? And the list continues.

This is of course rhetoric questions, different answers for each individual and are not relevant to our discussion. In essence, however, that even though our world is clearly not perfect, it is still unclear whether certain aspects of it can be increased or not. However, once we answer that question, the wisdom of the mother becomes relevant again because it makes us a clear way. We must work on aspects that can be improved and ignore the rest. Often the debate about which categories is including those who eat we live.

Poker is no different. No matter how the situation is, the thought of thinking number one asks yourself is: Can I do this differently? Where the answer is usually and frustrated is:

it depends! That’s bad news. The good news is that even though I don’t pretend to be arrogant to have one measure of all sizes for how someone can distinguish the streets of a deadlock, there are very useful heuristics, courtesy of the collective wisdom of our community with difficulty analyzing the analysis with difficulty games decades. This can be channeled artistically as follows: If you don’t feel enough pain, you might not do it right. (Whether or you have a spectacular mental game.) This is what I call “the principle of pain.” Maybe the two most classic examples of these are as follows:

• If you have never been caught, you are not quite bluff.
• If you never put and lose, you are not a thin enough value.

The idea of ​​these two examples is that the inherent game information cannot be accessed, occasional losses are unavoidable and need if we hope to order a long-term net win. If we can make, say, 2x with our successful snapping while losing only X by those who don’t succeed us, he pays to bluff even though we know sometimes we have to lose. The important word here is needed. Monetary “pain” is very important for our clean success. We cannot make this extra profit without bluffing and we cannot kick without sometimes losing. There is absolutely nothing we can do about that last part! Likewise with bets.

Many of you already know it. Some might even think that the idea of ​​”the pain needed” is a little out there and does not have a practical application. This is a very fair point. However, I will invite you to look closer to exploring non-standard examples of high-level pokers. In his last post-mortem analysis of the match with Daniel Negreanu, Doug Polk gave a deep enough review of Daniel’s game. The whole video is worth watching but there is a striking point that is very relevant to our discussion here. One of Doug’s biggest constructive criticism of Daniel’s game was, for one stretch of match, Daniel was not stacked for something like 2,000 hand in a row.

This shows a lack of serious aggression which certainly has an impact on the essence. Does it sound familiar? It seems that even a world-class player like Negreanu cannot avoid the temptation to reduce the “pain” of the saying from above. Is it consciously or not, Daniel might try to “do something” about the variance! Unfortunately for him, unless someone faces a weaker opponent, Hunl is not a type of format that can be played “small ball poker” and control the action or size of the stack. Especially when facing a world-class head specialist like Polk. The only way someone can have the chance is balanced as possible on the board. It not only implies taking various lines at various points but also apply bets with all kinds of sizes and with relatively high frequencies. This includes overbets and is of course pushed like a snapping, value and some hands including! Less than that and one now explains themselves at a completely new wound level.

Even though it could be said that some details have been simplified to make compact points, fixed key ideas: There is a “pain” amount that cannot be avoided (both in life and in poker) and there is absolutely nothing we can do to dodge. We can receive relatively small discomfort or risks this causes an even greater amount by trying to avoid it. Of course, this is easier to say than done. Whatever, there are still values ​​in articulating something before we begin to implement it so that we can at least have a clear vision to guide us.