5 Potential Reasons Your Poker Game is in Disarray

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Becoming a successful poker player takes a lot of hard-work and dedication, but when it comes to success in poker the answer doesn’t always reside in the X’s and O’s of strategy, or the oversimplified mantra of finding tournaments where you’ll have a good ROI. For many players the real opponent at the table will be themselves. There will be plenty of instances where you are indeed one of the best players in a given tournament and should have a great ROI, but for whatever reason your struggles still seem to follow you around, and you keep falling short of the money and more importantly the final table. In this article I’ll take a look at five possible reasons you are dooming yourself to failure at the poker tables.

You can’t stop playing “The Blame Game”

It’s very easy to point to a foolish call by an opponent as the reason you are out of a tournament, or to blame variance and your uncanny knack to lose every race whenever a spot at the final table is on the line. A far more difficult line to take is to stop pointing fingers and grab a mirror.

This isn’t to say that you have the power to eliminate bad luck by playing some mythical “mistake-free” strategy; poker simply doesn’t work this way, and a good deal of the time your bustout hands will be due to luck, or because of variance. At the same time, don’t kid yourself into thinking that you are infallible and are doing everything right, and pulling out the Hellmuthian “if it wasn’t for luck I’d win them all,” line.

Even when your bustout hand appears to be nothing more than a bad-beat, it’s still important to dissect the hand to see if there was anything you did wrong along the way. Before you pass the blame onto your opponents or lady luck (very easy targets to be sure) make sure you’re also pointing a finger at yourself, whether it turns out to be deserved or not.

Furthermore, the “Blame Game” doesn’t just apply to isolated events. Often times if you take a deeper look at your play you’ll find plenty of potential flaws in your own play that have contributed to your current predicament. For instance, if you put yourself in a position where you had to race because of a play or plays earlier on in the tournament – which you are now conveniently overlooking– and focusing instead solely on the bustout hand and your inability to win a race, you may be missing the forest while looking at a single tree.

Summary: In addition to pointing fingers at your opponents and at your bad luck, make sure you turn your powers of perception on your own play.

You have a problem with results oriented thinking

One of the first things you learn when you begin your journey as a serious poker player is to avoid looking at what happened instead of what was likely to happen; in other words, avoid being results oriented. As simple as this sounds (and we all think we have this part of the game figured out), the idea of results oriented thinking is so far out of the norm of mainstream thinking that even experienced players who know better have a hard time not falling back into this frame of mind from time to time. What makes this so dangerous is that if you ask any player who has read a poker book if they play “results oriented” poker, the answer will be a resounding “NO!” Which as you’ll see isn’t the case.

Unlike amateur players who live and breathe results oriented thinking, when it comes to experienced players, results oriented thinking is more likely to creep into your game at random times, especially when you are on a pronounced downswing, or when you are off you’re A-game for whatever reason –when you are tired, drunk, or what have you.

The problem is that most people think of being results oriented as something only the worst players are guilty of, and once they understand the “long-run” they pretty much brush aside the idea that they might be playing their results and not the odds. But even experienced players can fall into a rut and start analyzing and tinkering with parts of their game because they’re struggling, and not because there is some strategic advantage for doing so. Once you start losing, your instincts kick-in, and it’s only human nature to start questioning your strategies, even if the culprit is variance; it takes a strong-willed person to continue to play their usual winning aggressive style during a pronounced losing streak.

Summary: Being results oriented doesn’t begin and end with playing the odds and not the outcome.

You’re the Nostradamus of postdiction

You’re probably familiar with the word prediction, but a far more common occurrence is for people to be using postdiction. Poker players who use postdiction are simply deluding themselves, basically using a type of confirmation bias – using current information to support an already held position or belief– to back up whatever play they just made.

While they are somewhat similar, postdiction differs from being results oriented in that you are not basing your future play on what happened, instead you are using what happened to confirm a past play, thereby justifying your decision by using information you did not have at the time.

Perhaps the best example of a player using postdiction is when you knowingly make a bad call but later find you had some extra outs, but only against a very narrow range of your opponent’s likely hands. Postdsiction allows you to say things like, “I had him on two over-cards, so I figured that I had straight AND pair outs.” When the reality of the situation was that your opponent was just as likely to have a pair as over-cards, thus negating half of your pair outs.

Summary: When evaluating your play, make sure you are only using the information you had at the time, and not new information that has come to light after the fact.

You tilt too easily or too often

Tilt is a major problem for virtually every player I have ever encountered, and anyone who tells you they don’t tilt is probably a great bluffer because they are lying through their teeth. Even the very best, the most level-headed, and most successful players continue to struggle with tilt issues throughout their career. Tilt comes in many forms, as Jared Tendler explains in his book The Mental Game of Poker, and it’s not simply a matter of dealing with bad beats, or something only emotionally unstable people have to deal with.

The biggest problem experienced players have in terms of tilt is generally the ease with which they are put on tilt and the length of time they remain on tilt.

During a downswing, players tend to suffer from tilt carryover, where they come into a session already a bit on tilt from the previous session, which causes them to tilt at the first sign of adversity –think of it like a glued together lamp that hasn’t had enough time to completely set, so it’s far easier to break. This is something you should always keep an eye on and if you notice you are going on tilt far quicker than usual, you may have an underlying issue that needs to be resolved.

The same holds true for players who find they are staying on tilt longer than usual. This is another sign of an underlying issue, and not simply a byproduct of your current session. Without sounding like an advertisement, I highly recommend anyone having tilt issues to pick-up a copy of The Mental Game of Poker, by Jared Tendler.

Summary: There are many forms of tilt and no player is immune to the dangers of losing their handle on their emotions.

You’re resting on your laurels

One of the most overlooked issues that longtime players will have to constantly battle against is becoming complacent. Complacency (which is just a nice way to say being lazy) happens when you think you have the game figured out, and you start relying on your current skill set, figuring it will carry the day like it has in the past.

The problem is, even if you do have the game “figured out”, poker theory and strategy evolves so rapidly that if you are not continually improving and studying, the game will inevitably pass you by; no matter how strong of a player you are at the moment.

I know that I have experienced this myself, and there are perfect examples of this in the poker world –just Google some of the players who were on top of the world in the 90’s and early 2000’s and see how many are still atop the poker world today. If you don’t continually learn and keep current on what the latest theories and strategies are, you will be left behind, probably tilting too easily and playing the blame game!

Summary: Poker is constantly evolving so there is no end-game when it comes to poker knowledge. You have to continue putting in the hours away from the tables no matter how good you think you are.