MAKING THE BEST OF A LOSING SESSION!

Luck is a weird thing. I'm never really lucky. No I'm damn good! But I am quite unlucky from time to time. Separating luck from skill can be pretty hard. Nevertheless mastering this skill is pretty important, as it is a prerequisite for being able to perform a through analysis of your game. That is - analyzing your decisions independently of the eventual outcome.

At this point I'd like to state a fact: You learn much more from losing then you do from winning. Why? Well personally I'm way too busy congratulating myself to start running through how I played the hands when I've just won a big session. But when I've lost big, I can't let go. I keep asking myself what went wrong long after I've left the table, and the key hands run through my mind again and again. What went wrong? I should have won, with my superior skill shouldn't I?

When you replay your session in your mind after having left the table, you will usually find a few hands where you were very unlucky. Somebody ht their three outer on the river in a very big pot etc. And these few key hands are often the most obvious explanation for a losing session. The only problem with bad beats is that they don't really contain any valuable lessons. You probably played your hand the way you should, and a bad player got lucky. Or you got involved in a close decision where neither you nor your opponent could have played the hand any other way. In both cases, you were suffering from tough luck (just as you will have periods where you are lucky). But if you're looking to improve your game, it's the small drops that matter. The hands where you got sucked in, and should have known better. The calls you made where your gut told you to get out. The good hands you failed to bet for value. The lame bluffs you pulled against a player who was seeing every showdown all night. It's the small drops that make up the edge in the long run. Because these are the situations where your judgment make a difference. Big pots usually mean that at least two players have a big hand. Not much to do there then to play it out and hope for the best.

So you should replay every hand when you've had a bad session and is motivated for looking through your game. And you should have a note book where you should write down the conclusions. These notes are typically in the form of short lessons, and could for instance be:

• You don't have to bet the flop just because you have start raised,
• Don't play when you're tired
• Don't check on the river when you have lead the betting with a drawing

Those are all lessons I've acquired in this way. Make sure you do the same, and take the lessons you've paid for.

Thinking about your game a lot is a prerequisite for improving. A lot of players seem completely incapable of acknowledging that they are not Gods gift to the poker world. They KNOW how to play, and don't mind telling you. Some of these players with a gigantic ego actually do play a decent game. But their ego probably prevents them from recognizing the leaks in their game. When they lose it's because of bad luck only (or from the random number generator being skewed). In any case it has nothing to do with them. Fair enough. But as long even out for every one if you wait long enough, these players let their ego stand in the way for recognizing the situations where skills and not luck was involved. Most really good players I know are actually quite humble about their skills. They know that there are bigger fish in the ocean, and they know that becoming better is more important then being good. Over the long haul that is.

Another issue that may help you thinking more about your game is applying a stop loss. I never rebuy at a table. If I lose my standard bring in I have the rule that I leave and take at least a 10 minutes break. This has many virtues:

• It secures that you take the lesson you've just paid for, by taking the time to run through the session and see if there were hands you could have played differently. �
• It gives you a break to get your emotions under control. Most players get emotionally affected when losing, and it affects their game negatively. The stop loss makes sure that you don't go on full blown tilt. Well at least you get a break to assess whether your emotional state makes you fit for poker right now, or you need a longer break.
• It helps you at avoid seriously damage to your bankroll fro tilting. Cutting your losses is a vital ability for all gamblers. Stop and think before you blow it.
• If you don't see the fish at the table, you are it. You might simply be overmatched, in which case a table change is much preferable to a rebuy. It actually took me a long time before I became able to realize whether or not I was overmatched. A stop loss helps you make the right decision, even when you don't know that a table change is the right decision.

And with these pieces of advice I'll leave you to this beautiful description of the game we all love taken from the book "Zen and the Art of Poker":

You never quite control poker. It is more like rodeo riding, where you try to keep the bull under you as much of the time as possible. It is kind of shepherding of one's luck toward a given destination-something every bit as difficult as it sounds. In fact, due to luck's part in the mix, "there is sometimes a point beyound which expertise cannot go, a point forever off-limits." Yet, this is the challenge that attracts us to poker and keeps us coming back. It is sometimes difficult for even the expert player to fully grasp the concept of a game that requires both skill and luck...very few games in life work this way. Most competitions require either one or the other, not both.

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