A session I had a week ago gave led me to an important insight. I’ve been trying to take note when emotion rises and falls with me at the table. Trying to determine what triggers tilt in me will give me a good place to start in better managing my mental game. It’s really hard to fix a problem if you can’t clearly define it. With technical skills you would never see a player voicing a problem with their game with statements such as “I just can’t win, I suck!” So too with the mental game there are lots of different facets and flavors of problems and trying to get at the root of what’s going on isn’t always very easy.
One problem I’ve been having is coping with card death. I’ve tried deep breathing, going for walks, changing seats, all with spotty results. It’s a form of injustice tilt with me, I understand that getting “my fair share” of good starting hands means I should be playing one out of three or four dealt to me. I also understand, rationally, that a nice distribution only happens over a large sample. It’s crazy to think that I actually do play every third or fourth hand I get. That’s not how distribution works; it’s very messy in the short term. When I do coin flips I would never expect EVERY “heads” result would be followed by a “tails” and vice versa.
In a session of Hold’em I might play 100 hands and it’s possible that I would be dealt about 20 or 30 that are playable. But, 100 hands is much too small of a sample to see an appropriate distribution. Most of on line players recognize that 10,000 hands is the minimum sample size to obtain reliable statistics. Anything smaller and you run the risk of results being influenced by chance. The larger your sample size the more confident you can be in trends and not errors in calculation or just simple random occurrences in the data.
So, if over 10,000 hands my VPIP (voluntarily putting money into the pot) is still only 18% I’ve got a problem with too tight starting hand selection and I need to figure out where I’m missing equity. If I’ve got a VPIP of 18% after only 100 hands, I may have a problem, I don’t really know. It’s just as likely that I’m facing a cold deck as I am getting too nitty with my hand selection. This is where my mind gets foggy at the table. 70 hands or so into a session getting playable hands maybe once every other orbit I start to attribute my low VIPIP to things that statistically I can have no confidence in. I start to think that because there are 3 limpers in front of me I can play J-9 off suit because “I’m getting 5:1” and I think I’ve been playing too tight. This sort of thinking will clearly spell disaster for me.
If I can rationally understand that card death and cold decks happen, quite frequently actually, then why am I allowing it to put me on tilt? Much of it comes down to some of the intangible reasons I play cards. I enjoy playing well, making good decisions and trying to think through situations. I enjoy evaluating other players and just the mechanics of how poker works. I enjoy winning. I like the respect winning commands from others and I enjoy the banter and exchange of ideas with other strong players. When I compare what sets most players off, bad beats and suckouts, to what upsets me there’s a difference. No player likes getting outdrawn, the fall of an unlucky card and the pot shoved to a player without the same level of skill. But, these situations generally do not put me on my ear the same way card death does. Somehow I’ve equated conservative (i.e. winning) hand selection with not playing at all. Folding hand after hand doesn’t feel like striking out, it feels like never even being allowed to come to bat. When I get a strong hand and get drawn out on I feel like, “So be it!” I tried my best and I got beat, I can live with that. But when card death stretches into its second hour with me I feel impotent, like I’m wasting my time and jipped. I didn’t even get a chance to try and use my skills. I’m like a second stringer, begging the coach in the fourth quarter, “Put me in! Give me the ball! I want to play!” but never getting my shot.
So, what is it about hand selection that makes it feel like a jip? The adult learning model talks about levels of mastery starting with 1.) Subconscious incompetence (clueless, you don’t even know what you don’t know) 2.) Conscious incompetence (understanding your shortcomings) 3.) Conscious competence (learned skills you still need to focus on in order to use) and 4.) Subconscious competence (skills learned so well, they are employed without thinking about it).
When I was starting to learn to play poker, thinking about what cards to play was a big part of my learning curve. I had a list in my head and it didn’t really matter my position, my table image, the pot size, the action, the number of players in the hand and the relative quality of those players. I had to consciously match my hole cards with the list in my head in order to know what to do with them; fold, call or raise. Card death wasn’t such a problem for me at that time because so much of my thought process was occupied with this one element of hand selection. As hand selection has begun to receded into subconscious competence I’m no longer focused on it. It’s more or less automatic. Now my focus is much more on post flop play, evaluating my opponents and their range, calculating my equity and pot odds and other considerations that happen AFTER I’ve decided to play a hand. Does this mean my skill at hand selection has gone away? Heavens no! It’s just that it’s being employed at a level I’m not aware of as much.
So, no wonder that card death is eating at me more and more. It’s not so much that I’m not being dealt my “fair share” of cards. It’s much more that the things I’m paying attention to I don’t get to apply as much as I want. Understanding this aspect of tilt, what’s getting under my skin and why is going to go a long way to resolving this problem and will help me inject logic when I feel my frustration rising.
“You are playing your share of hands, it’s just that the skills you employ in selecting those hands is going on at a level you are less aware of.”
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