The first part of this article explored four reasons why thoughtful, serious players may be losing. Here are five more reasons.
Reason No. 5: Your opponents may be much better than you think. Just because other players looks like they’re laughing it up and not playing skillfully, doesn’t mean they are bad players. Some of the best players deliberately adopt a happy go lucky attitude in an attempt to loosen up the game. Serious players tend not to get as much action as happy and easygoing players. Some players mix up their sound game with some deliberately bad moves just for the advertising it gets them. You might mistakenly identify someone as a wild and crazy player when he is really crazy like a fox.
Reason No. 6: Your bad opponents may not be bad enough for you to win. In public games, it takes especially bad opponents for good opponents to make a profit. A table full of typical, casino poker players, playing uncreatively, without much thought, may not be sufficient for a good player to win enough money to beat the rake. These players may not be good, but they generally don’t have enough gamble in them or enough money in front of them to contribute sufficiently to a good player’s bottom line. It takes at least a couple of deep pocketed fish for most public poker games to be profitable.
Reason No. 7: You are not in the right position at the table. You may not be winning, even with a couple of big donators in the game, because you are not in the right position to take advantage of them. You want those deep pocketed fish as close to your right as possible, so you’ll have first crack at their stack. If they’re to your left, other players, especially other skillful players at your table, may well be taking advantage of them before you have a chance to use your skill.
Reason No. 8: Your seriousness of purpose may be cutting into your profit. Focus is good and clarity of thought is critical to winning poker. But if you appear too serious, you may be inducing your opponents to play better against you. By concentrating humorlessly, your opponents may realize that they should be careful around you. They may take fewer chances—tightening up and folding their borderline hands that they’d play against someone more ... playful. Ironically, your visibly earnest attempt at good play may be hurting your bottom line.
Reason No. 9: You’ve been unlucky. Finally, let me disabuse you of the notion that poker is just a game of skill. Though skill is a factor, it is not the exclusive factor in determining who wins or loses in any particular session—even a very long session. Luck plays a huge role too. Here’s an experiment that I recommend to you. Run a simulation on Wilson’s Turbo Texas Hold’em (or any similar software). Set it up with ten identical profiles for 4,000,000 hands. That’s the equivalent of playing forty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, for 50 years. If it isn’t the long run then what is? Because they are all the exact same player profile, they will play every single hand in exactly the same manner.
They are equally skillful. If luck truly evens out then they should all be flat even by the end of the simulation. But you will find a range from the “luckiest” player to the “unluckiest” player of many thousands of big bets. If the game were $10-$20, some player will almost surely have won at least $50,000 and another almost surely has lost at least $50,000 over this lifetime of hands.
In our simple human parlance, that would make one player $100,000 luckier than the other. He just happened to have gotten a better run of cards over his lifetime. That’s the true nature of poker. Even if you’re a good player, there’s still a lot of luck involved.
Ashley Adams is the author of Winning 7-Card Stud and Winning No Limit Low Limit Hold’em. He hosts the radio show House of Cards, broadcast Mondays at 5 – 6 p.m. in Boston, MA, on 1510 AM, and on the Internet at www.houseofcardsradio.com. Contact Ashley at asha34@aol.com.
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