Mental game concerns are as inherent to a winning poker player as his technical strategy. So spend time working on your mental game. Read about it. Keep records of it. Act on what you learn. The plan you need is not how you are going to emotionally react, which is impossible to control and even undesirable, your plan exists with respect to what you are going to do while feelings wash over you. Action: something happens. Decision: what am I going to do about it? Reaction: I do it. Action: I get sucked out on and feel bad. Decision: Shall I continue to play tilted? Sure, sounds great. Reaction: I do it, and get owned. Action: I take a walk to clear my head, but can’t. Decision: To sit or not to sit? Fuck this. Reaction: I’m leaving.
DZ isn’t ready to leave. He continues standing for a few hands, then open ships his remaining stack of $175 and change. 35x. A tad large, this bet. (What was that formula again, the open plus one blind for every limper in the room?) The white chips don’t play, but no one is going to tell him, because he knows. Actually, at this moment, he knows nothing. He is on tilt. The table doesn’t know how to respond, which in part is a tribute to them. They don’t pay attention much. They’re a level one sort of crowd, but anyone can and should recognize that this professional does not do this. The $175 open is for drunks and baccarat experts. Oh, and massive, Mt. St. Helens, release the Kraken tilters. In fact, Miniman and Mr. Straddler should probably remember, even more than their lucky score, the day they put a serious player into the atmosphere, for the first time many of us have ever seen.
The table pauses sympatico before folding to a heretofore unseen action for which no one can imagine a range of hands. Might those two cards be, most painfully, a suited gapper? Oh blood sweet irony.
Tilt is the homage your limitations pay to variance. You will never have all the chips, you will never win every hand, and you will never make all the right decisions. There was never any compelling reason, in fact, for you to win at all today. Most winning players, even crushers, win about 65% of their sessions: have you ever lost to a flush draw?
DZ gathers his chips and leaves. Now he is thinking and acting clearly, at long last: he is taking one possible course that differs from the last. He could have stayed. Maybe he should have. After all, these guys are terrible. (Poker folk wisdom: Im stuk 4 byins butt kneed 2 stay bc EDGE. LOLLOLOZLOLLLZZZ.) Indeed, very soon several of them will attempt to punt it all off without even so much as a second thought. (Is there a word for less than thinking at the poker table? Debt mining?) But leaving is good, too, especially if DZ recognized he would never play well today, not now. The final failsafe activated, the secondary parachute pulled. At every branch of the decision tree, DZ made a small mistake, each building up and mounting the one after, from the expeditious check to the uncharacteristic shove, but this choice was, at long last, a right move. Not the right one; there are no perfect lines in poker and no perfect answers to the mental game, obviously. Close enough, is good enough, however, when perfection is fiction. Quitting was his A game in action.
Just as one questionable decision can lead to another, the opposite is equally true: one right decision leads to another. This is the other credo of mental game consistency, and it explains why runbad and playbad are heads on the same hydra. So, since poker is won not only on the table, but off, what DZ does tonight will affect what happens tomorrow, as surely as what he did today. DZ needs to digest what happened, but also move his life forward to get past what happened. For now, he needs to rest and at some point, decide who he is going to be at tomorrow’s game. Not smolder with resentment and reenactments, but simultaneously process and gain perspective before he makes that decision and puts it into action. Maybe he’ll have a beer with friends, talk to his family, see a movie, walk his dog…
…or meet up with whoever his phone spun up for him: I’m guessing someone’s going to come through on a Saturday night, couples night, when desperation is measured in megs per second. A little rungood is a start, and his date will not doubt DZ did everything right. She’ll nod and wonder how she found such a good looking, normal guy online. He apparently had some sort of rough day at work (on a weekend, this guy is responsible), finance or something (it’s all so very complicated and he’s a little vague). You’re right, it wasn’t so bad, and there have actually been worse days. I just have to clear my head and move on. I guess I could have done that differently. Restart. This guy isn’t very arrogant, he admits his mistakes. That last guy was an ass, so easily upset! This one could work. Can we make something good happen? Shall we get out of here?
Sounds like a plan.
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