Poker Keep Getting Bad Hands

Bad players get way too attached to mediocre hands and overcommit themselves with such hands and take them way too far, then when they have a good hand they fail to get enough value out of it. But at the core of all this is that they just don't know what their opponent has, whereas good players can put people on a reasonable range and make. Out of all those hands, only 2 were limped in due to being the BB, every other hand had a PF raise ranging from $7-$15. The last hand that felted me, I had QQ in position and raised to $15, got called, flop was nothing, I bet $35, got called, turn was a 5, I bet $50, get called, river was a 5, I push $100, he goes all in, I call, and he flips. Giving more attention to watching the television than to what’s happening at the poker table when you’re in a hand. Talking to the waitress, another player, the dealer, and subsequently slowing down the action unnecessarily when it gets to you. Using your phone during a hand. (Some casinos forbid this, anyway.). It actually might be, if you define worst as the ones that you lose the most with. You almost never lose with the really bad ones as you fold them, but easily dominated hands can lose a lot of money. One of the biggest preflop mistakes you can make is call a raise with such a hand and then get married to a flopped top pair.

You Can Become A Winning Poker Player

I usually keep the tone of articles here light, friendly and deliberately non-preachy… After all, just because someone is new to poker and wants some concepts explaining does not mean they are not intelligent and successful people!

This time it is different. This time I want to get some home-truths out there – address a recurring theme on poker forums, blogs and in chat-boxes which kind of bugs me.

The kind of questions I’m referring to are these:

• ‘I am playing great poker, so why can’t I win?’
• ‘How can I make money when so many donks are making bad calls and sucking out on me all the time?’
• ‘Poker site X must be rigged against me’
• ‘I’m a great player, just constantly unlucky’
• ‘Should I move up levels to where people understand and respect my raises?’

If you can identify with any of these questions then this article is for you.

90% Of Players Feel They Are In The Top 20%

Ok, the statistic is just my estimate, however the vast majority of poker players do think they are naturally talented, or somehow innately better than their peers. When evidence accumulates (they lose!) that, well, they might not be such a phenomenon after all several mental defenses come into play. You’ll tell yourself that you are good but unlucky, that the blame lies with ‘bad players’ who do not understand your skillful play and then keep getting lucky against you – or even that poker sites rig the games against you.

These defenses are all well and good. They explain your frustration and keep you believing that you’ll break through one day…

Except you won’t break through.

You need a change of mindset to do so.

These defenses hold the huge majority of players back. Once you get over them you can start to work on your game in a constructive way, to give yourself a real chance of breaking through.

Here are my 3 ‘core realizations’ which players need to make in order to start constructively working on their games. I’ll deal with each point below.

1. – Poker is not rigged, and you are not the most unlucky player who ever lived.
2. – If you can’t beat bad players then you will get crushed by strong players.
3. – You are not some innate super-talent, you need to study and work hard on your game.

Realization #1 – Poker Not Rigged, You Are Not Exceptionally Unlucky

Poker Keep Getting Bad Hands Hurting

There have been billions of poker hands played online, even the smaller sites are in the 10’s of millions. These hands are tracked by the various tracking services and individually by millions of players using databases like Holdem Manager 2. You know what, the deal is random. Any perception you have otherwise is not supported by any evidence over large sample sizes. It is 2013, let us put this ‘rigged’ thing to bed once and for all!

Luck in poker is short term in nature. While a downswing can be brutal, the upswings will eventually compensate. What holds players back is blaming ‘bad luck’ as an excuse not to work on their game… the chance element evens out in the end, get over it.

Realization #2 – Too Many Donks Are Impossible To Beat

I know, I know, you read the strategy, studied the forums to see how the experts handle certain situations and played that hand damn ‘perfectly’. Then, *boom* some idiot who did not have a clue about solid poker strategy made a bad call and cost you your stack. This keeps happening again and again… and its getting to the point where you feel the only solution is to move up levels to where people understand your play and don’t make those stupid calls which end up costing you.

This thinking is extremely common, and deeply flawed.

First, players who make bad – as in negative expected value – calls are the easiest of all opponents to beat. Sure, they will stack you with some random hand occasionally, but you have a positive edge every time you play them. Over time you will accumulate money and they will lose it, period… all you need is to play as many hands as possible.

Secondly, poker strategy never works in a vacuum. It is never a case of ‘do x for $$$ every time’. The core of strategy is about playing against an individual opponent – if you are incapable of adjusting your strategy to exploit players who consistently make negative expectation plays of their own free will then you need to work on your game. Instead of thinking about the ‘best way to play hand XX in situation YY’ you should focus on the best way to exploit the weaknesses of players who make mistake ZZ.

If are not capable of understanding the adjustments needed to beat the worst players then those players who are capable of doing this will take your bankroll. They will see your tendencies and weaknesses and play in such a way as to exploit them, sometimes taking small edges repeatedly and sometimes attaching big leaks.

Newer readers, please – poker is about learning to spot and exploit the weaknesses of your opponents. No ‘bag of tricks’ will help you for long if you do not understand this!

Realization #3 – You Are Not Some Natural Talent

Sorry, I’d love to bring you the happy news that you are the next poker superstar – and that you need not work on your game along the way… unfortunately it just is not true. In fact, poker is tough, if you do not work hard on your game those people you label ‘lucky donks’ who have put in the hours will have an edge on you…

What is more this edge will only grow over time.

You see, the players who study their hand histories, locate and plug their leaks, go through areas with friends (virtual or real), read, watch videos and think about how they can maximize the value by changing their bet sizing in different situations (for example) are the ones who will show a profit over time.

The players who feel they know enough and simply log on and play will find themselves getting behind.

What is more, those who get a solid foundation through study will be best equipped to add new ideas and strategies to their games. Instead of an ‘trick’ they can integrate ideas into their solid understanding, knowing how and when to use the new idea to max advantage.

Luckily you can make fast improvements in this area by simply taking one hour of play from every 5 hours and using this for study instead. Or of course you could always blame bad luck!

Playing Great And Still Losing – You Can Become A Winner

I’ll end with some good news, you can become a winner – anyone of average intelligence + and a little motivation can beat online poker.

How far you go depends on how much effort you put in. Not just to education, but aspects like site / table selection, focus on the games and bankroll management too.

Once you get over the ‘excuses’ holding you back you can make the decision on whether to commit to the task of becoming a long-term winner, or relaxing and treating poker as a bit of fun – while enjoying the occasional win.

Plug For My SNG Course: If you are at the stage where you would like to build a bankroll, then please check out my free course ‘The $16 / Hour SNG Blueprint’. This will take you from novice to making $16+ per hour grinding Sit N Go tournaments over 4 parts. I wrote this to help build the audience for my site – and it continues to get fantastic feedback.

Related Article

Maria Konnikova is a New York Times bestselling author and contributor to The New Yorker with a doctorate in psychology. She decided to learn how to play poker to better understand the role of luck in our lives, examining the game through the lens of psychology and human behavior. This excerpt is adapted from her new book, “The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win,” which is available June 23.

For many years, my life centered around studying the biases of human decision-making: I was a graduate student in psychology at Columbia, working with that marshmallow-tinted legend, Walter Mischel, to document the foibles of the human mind as people found themselves in situations where risk abounded and uncertainty ran high. Dissertation defended, I thought to myself, that’s that. I’ve got those sorted out. And in the years that followed, I would pride myself on knowing so much about the tools of self-control that would help me distinguish myself from my poor experimental subjects. Placed in a stochastic environment, faced with stress and pressure, I knew how I’d go wrong — and I knew precisely what to do when that happened.

Fast-forward to 2016. I have embarked on my latest book project, which has taken me into foreign territory: the world of No Limit Texas Hold ’em. And here I am, at my first-ever tournament. It’s a charity event. I’ve been practicing for weeks, playing online, running through hands, learning the contours of basic tournament poker strategy.

I get off to a rocky start, almost folding pocket aces, the absolute best hand you can be dealt, because I’m so nervous about messing up and disappointing my coach, Erik Seidel — a feared crusher considered one of the best poker players in the world. He’s the one who finagled this invitation for me in the first place, and I feel certain that I’m going to let him down. But somehow, I’ve managed to survive out of the starting gate, and a few hours in, I’m surprised to find myself starting to experience a new kind of feeling. This isn’t that hard. This is fun. I’m not half-bad.

This moment, this I’m not half-bad making its fleeting way through my brain, is the first time I notice a funny thing start to happen. It’s as if I’ve been cleaved in two. The psychologist part of my brain looks dispassionately on, noting everything the poker part of me is doing wrong. And the poker player doesn’t seem to be able to listen. Here, for instance, the psychologist is screaming a single word: overconfidence. I know that the term “novice” doesn’t even begin to describe me and that my current success is due mostly to luck. But then there’s the other part of me, the part that is most certainly thinking that maybe, just maybe, I have a knack for this. Maybe I’m born to play poker and conquer the world.

The biases I know all about in theory, it turns out, are much tougher to fight in practice. Before, I was working so hard on grasping the fundamentals of basic strategy that I didn’t have the chance to notice. Now that I have some of the more basic concepts down, the shortcomings of my reasoning hit me in the face. After an incredibly lucky straight draw on a hand I had no business playing — the dealer helpfully tells me as much with a “You’ve got to be kidding me” as I turn over my hand and win the pot — I find myself thinking maybe there’s something to the hot hand, the notion that a player is “hot,” or on a roll. Originally, it was taken from professional basketball, from the popular perception that a player with a hot hand, who’d made a few shots, would continue to play better and make more baskets. But does it actually exist — and does believing it exists, even if it doesn’t, somehow make it more real? In basketball, the psychologists Thomas Gilovich, Amos Tversky, and Robert Vallone argued it was a fallacy of reasoning — when they looked at the Boston Celtics and the Philadelphia 76ers, they found no evidence that the hot hand was anything but illusion. But in other contexts, mightn’t it play out differently? I’ve had the conventional thinking drilled into me, yet now I think I’m on a roll. I should bet big. Definitely bet big.

That idea suffers a debilitating blow after a loss with a pair of jacks — a hand that’s actually halfway decent. After a flop that has an ace and a queen on it — both cards that could potentially make any of my multiple opponents a pair higher than mine — I refuse to back down. I’ve had bad cards for the last half an hour. I deserve to win here! I lose over half my chips by refusing to fold — hello, sunk cost fallacy! We’ll be seeing you again, many times. And then, instead of reevaluating, I start to chase the loss: Doesn’t this mean I’m due for a break? I can’t possibly keep losing. It simply isn’t fair. Gambler’s fallacy — the faulty idea that probability has a memory. If you are on a bad streak, you are “due” for a win. And so I continue to bet when I should sit a few hands out.

It’s fascinating how that works, isn’t it? Runs make the human mind uncomfortable. In our heads, probabilities should be normally distributed — that is, play out as described. If a coin is tossed ten times, about five of those should be heads. Of course, that’s not how probability actually works — and even though a hundred heads in a row should rightly make us wonder if we’re playing with a fair coin or stuck in a Stoppardian alternate reality, a run of ten or twenty may well happen. Our discomfort stems from the law of small numbers: We think small samples should mirror large ones, but they don’t, really. The funny thing isn’t our discomfort. That’s understandable. It’s the different flavors that discomfort takes when the runs are in our favor versus not. The hot hand and the gambler’s fallacy are actually opposite sides of the exact same coin: positive recency and negative recency. We overreact to chance events, but the exact nature of the event affects our perception in a way it rightly shouldn’t.

We have a mental image of the silly gamblers who think they’re due to hit the magic score, and it’s comforting to think that won’t be us, that we’ll recognize runs for what they are: statistical probabilities. But when it starts happening in reality, we get a bit jittery. “All these squalls to which we have been subjected are signs the weather will soon improve and things will go well for us,” Don Quixote tells his squire, Sancho Panza, in Miguel de Cervantes’s 1605 novel, “because it is not possible for the bad or the good to endure forever, from which it follows that since the bad has lasted so long a time, the good is close at hand.” We humans have wanted chance to be equitable for quite some time. Indeed, when we play a game in which chance doesn’t look like our intuitive view of it, we balk.

Poker Keep Getting Bad Hands Numb

Frank Lantz has spent over twenty years designing games. When we meet at his office at NYU, where he currently runs the Game Center, he lets me in on an idiosyncrasy of game design. “In video games where there are random events — things like dice rolls — they often skew the randomness so that it corresponds more closely to people’s incorrect intuition,” he says. “If you flip heads twice in a row, you’re less likely to flip heads the third time. We know this isn’t actually true, but it feels like it should be true, because we have this weird intuition about large numbers and how randomness works.” The resulting games actually accommodate that wrongness so that people don’t feel like the setup is “rigged” or “unfair.” “So they actually make it so that you’re less likely to flip heads the third time,” he says. “They jigger the probabilities.”

Poker Keep Getting Bad Hands Emoji

For a long time, Lantz was a serious poker player. And one of the reasons he loves the game is that the probabilities are what they are: they don’t accommodate. Instead, they force you to confront the wrongness of your intuitions if you are to succeed. “Part of what I get out of a game is being confronted with reality in a way that is not accommodating to my incorrect preconceptions,” he says. The best games are the ones that challenge our misperceptions, rather than pandering to them in order to hook players.

Poker pushes you out of your illusions, beyond your incorrect comfort zone — if, that is, you want to win. “Poker wasn’t designed by a game designer in the modern sense,” Lantz points out. “And it’s actually bad game design according to modern-day conceptions of how video games are designed. But I think it’s better game design because it doesn’t pander.” If you want to be a good player, you must acknowledge that you’re not “due” — for good cards, good karma, good health, money, love, or whatever else it is. Probability has amnesia: Each future outcome is completely independent of the past. But we persist in thinking that its memory is not only there but personal to us. We’ll be rewarded, eventually, if we’re only patient. It’s only fair.

But here’s the all-too-human element: We’re just fine with runs when they are in our favor. Hence the hot hand. When we’re winning, we don’t think we’re due for a change in the least. If the run is on our side, we’re thrilled to let it continue indefinitely. We think the bad streaks are overdue to end yesterday, but no one wants the good to end.

Why do smart people persist in these sorts of patterns? As with so many biases, it turns out that there may be a positive element to these illusions — an element that’s closely tied to the very thing I’m most interested in, our conceptions about luck. There’s an idea in psychology, first introduced by Julian Rotter in 1966, called the locus of control. When something happens in the external environment, is it due to our own actions (skill) or some outside factor (chance)? People who have an internal locus of control tend to think that they affect outcomes, often more than they actually do, whereas people who have an external locus of control think that what they do doesn’t matter too much; events will be what they will be. Typically, an internal locus will lead to greater success: People who think they control events are mentally healthier and tend to take more control over their fate, so to speak. Meanwhile, people with an external locus are more prone to depression and, when it comes to work, a more lackadaisical attitude.

Sometimes, though, as in the case of probabilities, an external locus is the correct response: Nothing you do matters to the deck. The cards will fall how they may. But if we’re used to our internal locus, which has served us well to get us to the table to begin with, we may mistakenly think that our actions will influence the outcomes, and that probability does care about us, personally. That we’re due to be in a certain part of the distribution, because our aces have already been cracked twice today. They can’t possibly fall yet again. We’ll forget what historian Edward Gibbon warned about as far back as 1794, that “the laws of probability, so true in general, [are] so fallacious in particular” — a lesson history teaches particularly well. And while probabilities do even out in the long term, in the short term, who the hell knows. Anything is possible. I may even final-table this charity thing.

Poker Keep Getting Bad Hands Getting

One thing is for sure: Unless I cure my distaste for bad runs and the sense of exuberance that envelops me during the good ones, I am going to lose a lot of money. And maybe if I lose it for long enough, I’ll eventually stop thinking that the cards owe me anything at all — whether that’s continued success or an end to a streak of bad runouts. Or that’s the hope. Otherwise I’ll be one broke poker player.

From the book “THE BIGGEST BLUFF” by Maria Konnikova, to be published on June 23, 2020, by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2020 by Maria Konnikova.

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