[Dommer]

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My thoughts are that it's the desperate to win a pot situation and an inability to play each hand as an individual situation. My previous hand/session is on my mind, I've just made a couple big laydowns and I ain't making another one etc etc.

C'mon guys I know I'm not the only person who ever called knowing I was beat.

The big question is who has gotten past this and what did it take/how did you learn to stop doing it????

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I think that attitude is just the mindset a beginning player who tends to be weak tight will take. As you become more experienced at poker you will realize that you can never 100% put someone on a specific hand, just a range. Even if hes the tightest player in the world and you play with him all the time, maybe today hes depressed and does something totally wacky (I've seen it). I'm very tight myself and sometimes I do things that I normally wouldn't do. That's the nature of poker, we're all human. It's a mistake to put someone on one hand. I know you think you can but you'll just have to take my advice and get over yourself if you want to improve. (Or you can do it the hard way like I did)

The correct mindset you should have for poker is "Am I making a good play or a bad play?". A good play can often end up losing you the pot, but the result is meaningless, you care about long term in poker, not one pot.

Deciding whether a play is good or bad is done by adding up all the data you have available to you and making an educated guess as to what would be the long term winning play. Such data would be your hand, the board, how the action went, pot odds, reads on your opponent, meta game considerations, etc.

Sometimes your hand is so strong you don't have any guess work, you just want to get the money in the pot. Your JJ is an example of that. I'll disregard how badly you played that hand and let other people comment on it, but I'll say this one point. If the hands were reversed, do you think your opponent is getting away from JJ there? Theres almost no chance of that, so long term thats just a break even situation. Another way to look at is if you looked for 1000 JJ hands with similar action the JJ woudl be well ahead, not negative. Top set v flopped straight... it happens, and you're not avoiding it usually. But in the reverse, if you fold your top set incorrectly to his lower set or bottom two pair, you just made a HUGE mistake. Pot odds is another thing you have to consider, I'm not looking at the hand, but if the pot is offering you say 2-1, you only have to be right 33% of the time to make a profit. So even if he has the straight there 60% of the time you still made money. 2-1 is a pot size bet, your odds were much better I believe.

An argument could be made for you to slow down on your middle two pair hand and try to control the pot depending on opponent, but without a read its ok to play it really hard. You'll make money long run doing that.

Anyways, to summarize, you played both the hands badly for long term success, and you have the wrong mind set for evaluating your play. You can't improve your play if you don't have the correct tools for evaluating it. So I'd start there.