Poker is a funny game. It may be the only game where in order to play your very best, you need to instantly forget about your most recent results. Anytime we drag a big pot, there's a little voice in the back of our minds telling us: You played it right! You deserved to win! And we want to believe that voice. It's a perfectly natural, instinctive human response-but in poker it can be a disastrous mistake.
Because to listen to that little voice is to fall into the trap of results-oriented thinking, hereafter known as ROT. It's an apt acronym, because ROT degrades the mind's ability to see the situation clearly. It clouds your judgment about what is or is not the right play in any given hand. If you won the last pot, you'll be inclined to believe the decisions you made in the hand were correct. So in future hands, you'll get a warm-and-fuzzy feeling about making those same decisions again. But if you lost the hand, you're likely to feel gun-shy about making the same choices later, regardless of how correct and positive EV they may be.
Yes, poker is a game of skill in the long run, but in the short run it can be a crap-shoot. Smart poker players know this, and even they can have a hard time ignoring short-term outcomes. We're all creatures of the here and now, and the question of whether we win or lose this hand, this session, this tournament, has a very real and immediate effect on our wallets, as well as our pride. Enormous discipline is required to stay away from ROT-and to focus solely on making the best decisions-the ones that are proven to be the most profitable in the long run.
As a practical matter, we need to track our poker results. That's the only way to know our win-rate and standard deviation, among other things. This is necessary information. But that's all long-term stuff, where results will at least begin to approximate skill. ROT is problematic because it focuses on a micro-result, which often has nothing to do with skill, while totally missing the big picture.
Suppose you're in a loose, wild game. You're dealt pocket queens and raise before the flop. Neither the flop northe turn improve your hand, but you're still ahead until the guy who cold-called you with A-4 catches and ace on the river to beat you. A few hands later you get queens again and raise once more, only to lose to a guy who flopped a set with pocket sixes. Then you're dealt queens yet again. At this point it's tempting to think: I can never get anybody out with a raise; they call with garbage and draw out anyway, so I might as well just call with my queens. That's ROT talking. Pocket queens are a fabulous starting hand that wins money in the long run, even in a crazy loose game.
To avoid ROT, you must block out that emotional knee jerk response that occurs whenever you make the right play and lose, or make a lousy play and get lucky. It means keep raising before the flop with A-K, even though the flop completely missed you the last three times you held Big Slick.
It means that just because it "worked" last time you made a loose call with bottom pair and were lucky enough to make a set on the river, it's not necessarily a good play to make again. Every choice you make in the game must be viewed in terms of long-term equity. Poker is nothing if not situational. Like the pattern of a snowflake, every hand of poker is unique unto itself, and yet subject to general laws. Allowing ROT to dictate your poker decisions is like trying to predict the weather by studying the pattern of one or two snowflakes.
Barbara Connors is a sucker for classic old movies, science fiction, and the St. Louis Cardinals. Her life's ambition is to figure out the unusual behavior patterns of that unique breed of humans who call themselves poker players. Contact her at fyreflye222@yahoo.com.
