When I was growing up having aspirations of being the next big time pitcher in the MLB, I was constantly working hard on my game and always thinking about game situations. The hard work eventually paid off. I helped my high school team win a state championship by pitching to a 12-0 record my senior year. This would cap a 26-2 three year varsity high school career pitching record and another 10-0 on the JV team my freshman year.
I was truly on top of my game then. I would receive all kinds of accolades, many of which were on the national level.
Growing up, my motivation was not just the aspirations of baseball stardom. I wanted to win every time I took the mound. It was who I was as a person. I used it as my other motivation, the hate for losing.
When I went off to a then-ranked top 25 division 1 college for baseball and had to have surgery on my pitching arm after my freshman year, I was distraught. Needless to say I was never the same and it showed on the playing field. I just couldn’t do what I was capable of doing years before. It was a hard time for me. I had to cope with the fact that I couldn’t win a game solely due to my efforts on the mound each time out.
Today my new brand of competition is poker. Not much has changed when it comes to my thought processes for motivation though. I want to be the next poker phenom taking a huge pot from Phil Ivey at the WSOP final table. Not only that, but I want to win, and win often. Along with this will come the money which is a third motivation.
So it is only natural to get upset when I don’t win. When I go on a streak like I have been recently, you can only imagine how much more upset I get. I start to question if poker is really the right outlet for me in this stage of my life. I just can’t seem to handle the losing.
Imagine only breaking about even 15% of the time and only making what many consider a decent profit less than 5% of the time. The rest of the time, you lose your investment. This is the life of a multitable tournament specialist. It is a life full of failure.
People say it is similar to a batter in baseball. If you can get out only 70 percent of the time, you could be an all-star. Well, I didn’t hit. I was a pitcher. I guess I never prepared myself for these types of failures.
In fact I have even taken the time to read Zen and the Art of Poker in the past. Though it was a great book, it just left me with the knowledge of how I should be and I couldn’t really apply what I had learned. Maybe I should go back, re-read the book, and see if I can’t come away with a different outlook.
But looking for an immediate response to my recent tournament losing ways, I took one of my last resorts. I posted the question of why I even care to work on my game any more in the PokerXFactor forums. I listed a couple of bad beats that happened all in one night just to give examples.
I got many of the same answers that I would expect, many of which I have given to other players when they are in a rut.
“don’t be so results-oriented, be happy you are getting your money in good”
“it’s just variance, your luck will change”
“your hand is only a slight favorite, you cant win every hand”
But then I started to get some other responses. Taking the topic more into the psychological aspects of the game. I realized exactly what I have started this blog post off with, I don’t know how to handle losing in poker.
I have been doing nothing but focusing on the negatives when I lose. Missing opportunities for me to see if I could play hands differently and ultimately putting a stalemate on my learning process as an overall player. In fact, one player over at PXF put in a quote that really started to make me think:
When you change the way you look at things – the things you look at change.
I would later find out that the quote was from Dr. Wayne W. Dyer after doing some research through Google.
Also, through this time of getting feedback from other players at PXF, I also browsed the forums at 2+2 and came across an article written by Gigabet a while back. It was titled “Almost there with Success and Failure (Long)”. It really hit close to home and made me realize how I am setting myself up for failure in poker. Not just short term, but long term as well.
I need to realize that along with the highs in poker, there will be plenty of lows. I really don’t even have a large enough sample size of tournaments to completely overcome the luck factor. Just because I get knocked out on ridiculous beats 20 tournaments in a row, doesn’t mean that I can not win. It just means that I am getting that much closer to that tournament where I don’t get a bad beat, the tournament where I can bring home a solid win that I can enjoy for a while to come.
I need to keep poker in the mindset that once attracted me to baseball when I was in little league. “It is fun!”
That’s right, good ‘ole Virginia Commonwealth. I have mentioned in past posts that I played baseball there for what now seems ages ago (I am getting old). But watching this run they have made, when many of the so-called experts didn’t feel they deserved the chance to compete in the tournament, has made me feel like I am back in college all over again.
