Cris et al.

[CrisBrown]

Hi Doc,

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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.

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I agree 100%, and that's why I said I don't think I'm the world's unluckiest poker player, or anything close to it. Swings happen. The idea is to win more in your good swings than you lose in your bad ones, and to be ahead of the game when things are running "average."

One of the things I do when things are running like this is to drop down in stakes. I hate losing, period, but this at least minimizes the financial hit. I know I'll win back the money I've lost this week, once I've taken some time away from playing, let those negative feelings wash away, and can go back to playing my game well.

But all of that is intellectual knowledge, and it doesn't change the emotional response. Even the best players in the world -- and I'm certainly nowhere in that category -- can get emotionally rocky when things are running bad. I'm certainly not immune to it, and I don't think anyone else here is either. We all know bad swings happen to everyone, but when they happen to you ... they still hurt.

I was watching a friend play last night, chatting with her on the phone, and someone's AA lost to TT when a T fell on the flop. The player with AA typed "unbelievable," and my friend agreed. I said "Is it 'unbelievable' when you roll a six-sided die and it comes up 6?" She said no, that was not unbelievable, nor even unusual. "Well," I said, "that is what just happened with the AA vs. TT hand. TT will win one time in six."

The difference, though, is emotional investment. When you get AA, though, from the moment you see those cards pop up, you start looking at your stack and other people's stacks, figuring out where you'll stand in the tournament after you win this pot. You're investing emotion in that hand.

My friend will often say (on the phone, to me) "Oh please, somebody, raise." She's already investing in that hand. Then, when someone pushes in ahead of her, the investment gets even greater: AA, and she's getting the action she wants. But then that damn Ten (or whatever) falls ... and all of that emotional investment goes down the tubes. It's not the one-in-six unlikely outcome that hurts; it's the lost emotional investment.

(As an aside, I think this is why getting outdrawn at the river hurts worse than getting outdrawn at the flop; we've had more time to make a greater emotional investment.)

Now, I suppose it's possible that some among us are Spock-like, emotionless creatures, but I doubt it. Yes, after a while, you're used to seeing the one-in-X hit, and you try not to get as emotionally invested in a hand. But I think it's still there, and it still hurts.

And I suspect that, by and large, when people post a truly bad beat story here, they're really not looking to hear how they played the hand fine and got outdrawn, or whatever. That may be the text of the response they hope to hear, but I suspect the subtext is something else entirely. At some level, they want to hear: "No, it's not you. You are not uniquely cursed. There are no poker gods out to get you. You're not being punished for some imagined sin. You just lost a hand of cards. That's all."

Because, for all of the logic and mathematics, when it comes to our emotions, we're all primitive creatures.

Cris