1st Month in Retro--advice needed

[hotsauce615]

Started playing online for cash about 3 months ago. I sold an online game account for 100$, and immediately took a slide on party down to like 60$ and got bailed out by my bonus. I read Matthew Hilgers internet hold em book, as well as most of Sklansky's stuff already. I finally got in to a groove and improved my roll to 260$ on poker, only to fall down to 200$. Since no bonuses were working for me I made the switch to Absolute. Absolute was a different animal, and I managed to work my cash up 320$ on there, and also turn 25$ free on Empire into 75$. So I'm roughly up 300$ through casual play. My biggest issue is letting go of hands, and handling bad beats. Any book I ever read says a good poker player learns to take bad beats in stride, but they really get to me when they happen to much. I am right now in something like a 50+BB situation, and I'm contemplating pulling out. Any advice to ease the mind?

[bholdr]

Here's a copy of a post i made at bonuswhores about dealing with tilt:

[ QUOTE ]
heres some anti-tilt techniques that may help you, when you feel tilt coming on...

A: Make stupid bets at very small limits. you can't get your money back long term making big stupid bets (which is really what tilt does to a player), but you can get the gamble out of your system by making dumb bets, as long as they're very small, you'll get a cheap lesson in why such bets are a bad idea and be more relaxed when you get back to clearing your bonus.

sometimes in poker I’ll go to a .5/.10c limit table with like a thousand dollars and cap every street with terrible hands. this 1: helps me see just how dumb that is, and 2: satisfies my urge to gamble, 3: it costs less than one tilty hand at the .3/6 stud tables where I usually lurk, and 4: eventually I make a two-outer for a 40BB pot, and pass the tilt off on some other poor bastard.


B: Do some quick exercise, like 50 pushups, 50 crunches and 20 lunges (my fav), then get a glass of ice water, chug it. very refreshing, for both mind and body. or, if you're lazy, whack off. I’m not kidding, it works like you wouldn't believe. (my gal was unwilling to give me a BJ every time I got aces cracked, maybe your significant other is more understanding?)


C: just quit for the day. it’s hard, but a lot easier than quitting after losing another hundy

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It was only half-serious/ half humor, but that stuff works. try it out, especially exercise- take a beat, stop fot ten minutes and work out.

Additionally, i've found that the more bad beats that i take, the less and less they concern me. One thing that really helped was playing in cardrooms, where you're face-to-face with the guy that just laid the beat on you. You see them having a good time, not really paying attention, gambling it up, sheepishly dragging the pot, and you'll KNOW that they're a fish, and the kind of player you want to play against. bad beats are short term bad, long term good, and one has to seperate their natural reaction (how the hell?! that's not fair! man, i should start playing crap like that! etc..) from their intellectual understanding of the game (i only took that beat because i was ahead and the cards didn't go my way- it was a +ev situation, my play was correct). 20+BB swings happen to me every day, 50BB swings are also pretty common- they're nothing to be overly concerned about.

And don't pull money out- you've probably been running good, and will eventually run bad, and you'll need that coushin so you don't go bust and have to quit. Play long enough, and you'll hit a really, really, horrible, nightmare run of cards where you'll flop the nuts like ten times in a row and get 'em cracked each time- the only way to pad yourself against that run is to have a proper bankroll and be able to resist tilt and handle beats... it's a long term process, don't get discouraged by early setbacks (though it looks like you're donig fine- you're playing .50/1 limit, right? you should be, given your BR).

GL (sry for the rambling post, i find that by articulating this stuff, i reinforce and develop my own understanding)

[signal]

[ QUOTE ]
Any advice to ease the mind?

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This is no dount a psychological questions.

Poker is a cruel, slow way to amusement. You need to have fun with your pain, afterall.

Upon reading your post I noticed that you have been in poker for 3 months and you play small stakes. Fine. That is okay; it actually is to your advabtage.

You lack confidence. That is okay. This is common, yet it should be dealt with carefully.

To be instructful here, bonuses do help you earn. When done properly they can propel you up a limit inb yr game.

Now, to get to the meat of yr post. You say the "biggest issue" you suffer from is that you "have trouble letting go of hands," and "handling bad beats."

Handling bad beats equals profits. If you're a winning player you will often suffer bad beats. Those are the beats to suffer. If you are playing sub-optimally you will suffer other beats, beats where you made the mistake.

The above paragraph naturally leads into the concenpt of variance. This is the demon that teaches players that they suck when in fact they are good, and vice versa.

You probably haven't played enough hands to draw practical conclusions. You need atleast 30,000 hands; 50,000 to 100,000 are, of course, much better. This is a long game. It is a journey to obscurity and defeat, like life itself.

son cosas de la vida.

when you have trouble letting go of hands, you must remember that mastery of postflop play is essential. I think this is true in any form of poker: the more information given to the players, the more skillful players will rise to win the pots.

My advice to you is to play a game for which you are properly bankrolled, so that you feel comfortable playing. Something where you can relax and win.

[jb9]

I took more than my fair share of bad beats the last few days and found myself getting pretty frustrated, so here is what I've been doing:

1. Playing less poker.

2. Exercising more.

3. Reviewing some of the hands where I lost big pots to see if they really were "bad beats" or if I made a mistake.

4. Re-reading some sections of poker books, including the "On Steaming, Calm, and Composure" and "On Losing, Slumps, Bad Beats, and Bad Luck" chapters of The Tao of Poker (by Larry Phillips).

Learning when to let go of hands takes some experience. Two things you need to learn are the odds of improving your hand and how to decide which hands your opponent likely has.

The odds you can learn from any good poker book, but you have to have experience and discipline to calculate the odds in the middle of a hand and then fold when you do not have odds to draw to your straight.

Putting your opponents on hands is not as clear cut, and I'm still working on that myself. Reading the strategy forums (like the Micro-Limit forum) is a good place to learn more about this stuff.

Good luck.