[britspin]

This is a really interesting point to me. Tonight I had a very negative session at my piddly little limit of $1/$2- down over 60BB in an hour of two tabling (wanna hear a story? Thought not..).

I had two thoughts at the end of it. One. Losing sucks. It's really annoying, and is absolutley no fun. Winning, on the other hand, is fantastic. I bet I'll try to forget the losing really quickly.

The second was to try and work out where I went wrong and how much i wanted to get better. As it happens I think this time it was marginal, and the savings I could have made were river calls.- still, that was prob 5 BB and that's significant and I need to focus on it. other times though losing has been a real wake up call to bad habits.

Anyway, my point is that losing players will have the same emotional reaction to losing (it sucks) that I do, but a very different rational attitude- either to not worry about the money "because it's a gamble" or simply to carry on blindly without reflecting on why they lose.

I'm relaxed about the first set of people, but the second, doomed to commit the same errors agains and again, give me pause. They'd be better off playing roulette. In the end they'll either quit or develop a problem.

That makes me feel bad, becasue at heart i'd rather the poker boom were a bubble that will pop than an addiction that will hurt people. Even though this is ultra -EV for me.