[mark76g]

Hi,
I come from a blackjack card counting background orinially but I've played poker on and off casually for a couple of years with mixed results. There are a couple of concepts that have always eluded me and I'm interested to hear what people think.

The first thing is how do I calculate the cost of a mistake and how do I define a mistake ?

A bad beat where I go all in heads up with AA and the other players junk wins on the river is clearly a bad beat for example.
But what if I play AK and make AAs on the flop and the guy played junk and got bottom two pair and gos all in.
Lets say hes loose so I decide on average its worth the risk
but then discover I was wrong. I lose my whole stack.

Was that a mistake ? and if so do I sit there saying well I normally make $50 per hour so that just cancelled out 6 hours work ?

Or do I use the logic ... well 3 out of 4 times that guy would have allined with a smaller hand than AA so my call was ok and I should just play on.

What about nasty traps where I flop a pretty good hand like say top trips but I'm up against somebody elses house.
I don't know the other player well enough to know any info other than hes pleased and believes he had a good hand.
i bet out aggressivly to drive out draws he raises I call things work out badly for me.

Should I withdraw from the game and consider myself unworthy. Is that a mistake that a pro wouldn't make ?

In no limit the result of a days play often hinges on a single event. Lets say I start with $200 in front of me play for 4 hours. In senario 1 lets say I play a great game and now I've got $700 and in senario 2 its the same game with the same hands but I don't play very well and there is now onlt $150 left in front of me but at the 4 hour mark a nasty trap hand comes up mabey I get dealt KK and somebody else with a big stack gets AA and goes all in. Either way im all in so my four hours worth of previous play becomes irrelevant unless I bad beat the other guy with a king of course.

With poker I find it hard to really define whats going on. I can look at my records and say I'm making $X per hour for 100 hours play but alot of the results are heavily derived from a hand full of events so am I really ?

When I really do get out played by other players I need to be able to recognise it and change games but it often hard to say.

So how can I tell for sure if I've just made a mistake and got outplayed and is there a good way of estimating how much my mistake just cost me in the long run ?

Mark.