The following article, originally published in Cardplayer Magazine, was written by Eric “Rizen” Lynch.  Rizen is a professional poker player from Olathe, Kansas.  I can personally say that his first video series for PokerXFactor was probably one of the biggest eye-openers for me as a poker player.  I have read where some publications consider Rizen a timid personality; well his poker playing is nothing short of audacious.  I hope you enjoy his writing.  I know I do.

One of the toughest things about poker is that the variance that the luck factor brings to the game can really mess with your short-term results. I often receive questions like the following from readers of both this column and my blog: “Could you fold aces here?” “Can I get away from a set here?” There are some rare instances when I can, but for the most part, these are just inexperienced players who suffered a bad fate (their aces or sets got cracked), and since they lost the pot, they’re desperately trying to figure out what they did wrong.

Poker is a funny game that way. Some players are always blaming luck when they lose a pot, while others are always looking for what they should have done differently. The truth is, we measure our success in the game by our profit, so we should be results-oriented, right? Well, yes, we should be long-term results-oriented, but in the shorter term, we should expect some variance within the game and realize that sometimes we’re going to make good decisions that lead to bad results, and sometimes we’ll make bad decisions and still get rewarded.

The key to evaluating your game and not letting short-term fluctuations lead you to alter your game in negative ways is being able to evaluate situations and hands after they’re over without being results-oriented. Have confidence in your game and look back at the decisions you made. If you believe they were correct, move on even if the result wasn’t positive.

I’ve found that it also helps if you have some friends you trust from both a skill perspective and an honesty perspective with whom you can discuss hands or situations. Lay the situation out for them and ask them what they would do. Make sure not to tell them the results of the hand, though; that way, they can just look at the situation in isolation and give feedback. Also, when approaching your peers, make sure that you ask not only about hands in which the results where unfavorable, but ones in which the results were favorable, as well. Maybe it’s a hand in which you drew out but the decision was close, or a situation in which you thought it was a real close decision and you ended up having the best hand, but you’re not positive that your play had a positive expectation against your opponent’s hand range.

Book co-authored by Rizen, Pearljammer, and Apestyles

As an example, I recently played a hand in which I raised with the Q 10 from the button. The big blind flat-called. The flop was K 9 2 , a dream flop for me. The big blind checked to me, I made a standard continuation bet, and he made a decent-sized raise. Looking at our stack sizes, I knew that if I flat-called and he bet the turn, he would be committing himself to the pot. I wanted to play for his stack, so I just flat-called. Sure enough, on the turn, he put the rest of his chips in and I gladly called, only to see him turn over the A 5 for the nut flush.

Now, if I were being results-oriented, it would be very easy for me to look back on this hand and try to figure out a point where I could have laid it down. The truth is, though, that the stacks weren’t deep enough for me to ever really get an indication that I was beat. I very easily could have been up against something like the A K, a naked A , or even a set. A vast majority of the time, I end up with this guy’s entire stack and don’t think twice about it. There are times when situations arise and there is really very little you can do to avoid them. It’s key to be able to recognize these situations and not let the results impact future plays. I’d be making a huge mistake if the next time I was faced with that exact situation, I folded my queen-high flush out of fear that my opponent held the only hand that beat me.

The bottom line is that in the longer term, we need to be focused on producing results. However, in the shorter term, we need to be more focused on making good decisions than on the outcome of those decisions. That can be a constant challenge, since poker can throw some real curveballs at you at times. The good news for us poker players is that it is this very form of short-term variance that leads bad players to give us their money. They’re often having bad decisions positively reinforced in the short term when they get lucky, and they’re always able to blame the bad results on luck.

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!”