Pokerwiner.com → Within poker principles
Why is Everyone so Distracted?
The question then is why so many poker players focus unproductive on their short term fluctuations. I believe I can provide at least a partial answer. The degree to which a player is likely to attend to short term swings, and therefore form the faulty conclusions described, appears to be largely a function of four factors.(Certainly there are other elements at work as well, but these four are key.)
1.The wrong goal.
The first involves the basic goal a player has in mind when he sits down to play. As strange as it may sound, most players are too focused on winning. It is far more productive to make correct play your goal and let winning take care of itself. Yet few players seem truly to appreciate this. Most are drawn misguidedly to be concerned with their short term monetary results. When they win they become self satisfied and assume they’re doing everything right, and when they lose they waste time cursing their bad beasts, as if they’ve been singled out to have uniquely bad luck. I cannot overstate how counter productive these responses are. This focus on the wrong goal is nearly always involved in reaching the erroneous conclusions about one’s skill level that I have described.
If you are a serious player you can do yourself a favor by learning enough poker theory to determine how well you are playing by analyzing your play itself rather than concerning yourself with your recent fluctuations. This analysis, along with your hourly rate (over enough hours to be meaningful ), will put you in a position to assess accurately how you are playing. Concern with the wrong goal is quite natural in poker. You sit down to play a game in games you try to win. Yet in poker, as in some other games, over-concern with winning rather than simply trying to play well, can hurt your end result.
Of course there are plenty of winning players who maintain this focus which I am saying is wrong. Many winning players, in fact, would say that they have never even considered the possibility of a goal other than simply winning. I believe that the majority of the players who win the most over the long run unwittingly adopt the correct focus much of the time. Yes, they want to win, but to some extent they put that out of their minds, and of the time concentrate more on correct play.
2.Inadequate knowledge.
Merely knowing the correct focus is not enough. A player must be able to do something productive with the data he examines. When he cannot, it is because of the second factor: The lack of sufficient knowledge of poker theory. Without this knowledge a player’s focus moves inevitably back to what he sees most clearly, his fluctuations.
3.Lack of knowledge of probability.
One component of the second factor is important enough to be mentioned separately. This factor is the knowledge of probability as it relates to gambling theory in general, and poker in particular. If a player does not have an accurate appreciation for the random nature of the fluctuations experienced in poker, he will begin incorrectly to attribute meaning to them. He will say, “Look, I’ve won so much lately I must be the best player around.” This is not unlike the player who decides that it means something that he has often won when he sits in a certain seat, or wears a certain shirt. The player’s results, though distributed randomly, have, for some period, fallen within what looks to him like nonrandom pattern which he can see in retrospect. He believes this is meaningful. He cannot appreciate that within a random distribution, patterns of all sorts will eventually appear.
On Tilt: Part II – The Professional Attitude / Subtle Losses of Judgment: Part I
Subtle Losses of Judgment: Part II / A Poker Player in Therapy