[DrPhysic]

Cris, et al:

I sympathize. Really I do. I even post a bad beat myself occasionally. My aces full of kings that was beaten by quad Aces a couple of weeks ago, was brutal at the time, but was posted as much as anything because I found it funny.

You will occasionally see me make a post, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, to the effect that “Poker God has been on my case so long I forgot what I did to hack him/her off.”

Nobody seems to get it. For once, I will spell it out.

If you really believe in luck, or poker gods, or rabbits feet, or bad beats, or etc, and have any real intention of winning, you probably shouldn’t be gambling. People complain about having a bad (multiple choice) hand, game, week, month, etc. The fundamental problem here is that the human psyche just is not normally up to waiting out a true statistical sample. We get frustrated when a few hands, or games, or weeks don’t go our way. A statistical sample on which we can evaluate our skill, luck, lack of either, etc is NOT one game, 20 games, even 100 games, and certainly not the maybe 1000 hands that we played this week.

PokerAZ made a post recently that was the most intelligent one I have seen in a while. It was an honest evaluation of his play over his first 20000 hands. Then he asks the question: “Is 20k hands enough to draw any real conclusions?”

Well, it’s not bad, but if you were treating this as a normal 40 hour a week job, that’s less than 2 months at 65 hands an hour. Wait a while. The numbers will be more meaningful at 6 months, especially if your early experience was climbing a steep learning curve. You probably didn't learn your regular day job in the first two months.

I am by no means suggesting that we quit posting hands, be they good bad or indifferent. “Did I play this hand well, even though I got beat?”, or “How should I have played this?” are intelligent and meaningful questions from which one might learn something. But crying about having had a bad hand or week etc, is so far short of a real statistical sample as to be meaningless. In the short term, you are going to win some and lose some. If you are playing good poker, if you have taken the time to read, and learn, what is in the better poker books, if you are making an effort to play intelligently and trying to win not just sitting at the table enjoying yourself, then over a large number of hands, and a long period of time you will be a winner. Just don’t let the frustration get to you in the short term, because it is statistically insignificant.

Edit: There is one further note on the subject that I think should be made. Many if not most poker players lose money over the long term. If you enjoy the game, enjoy sitting at the table, BSing with the guys, having fun, and the losses are within your budget, so what? Poker as a hobby is probably no more expensive than golf, or bowling, or riding roller coasters, and none of us started out any of them with the intention of winning the pro tour. So winning is not the only objective, even though it is nice when you do. In this group, and with poker players in general, we tend to put a great emphasis on winning. To the point possibly, of lying to ourselves and others about our long term results. But if you enjoy the game and it is a fun hobby, what exactly is wrong with that, as long as you are not losing the family farm or gambling with the kids' lunch money? Have fun, it's as good a recreation as any other.

Doc [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]