Mentality plays a very important role in any poker player’s career. As an individual discipline, all responsibilities for what happens at the table rest solely on the player’s conscience. If you don’t have a strong mentality, it’s normal to fall into tilt or something even worse, blaming external factors, such as variance, for our failure.
It’s normal, in almost any sport, to look for something external to blame when things don’t go our way. In turn, people almost always take all the credit themselves when things go well. What is particular about poker is that, many times, bad results can indeed be due to an external factor, such as variance, which can lead us into the fallacy of believing that this is the only determining factor.
Many times, we judge the quality of decisions by the results they obtain. If a player folds the winning hand, we say they played badly. If they manage to hit a one-outer, we say they played well. Winning despite mistakes causes those mistakes to become ingrained in your game and you repeat them with the confidence that they have worked well for you. That is why attention should be placed on decision-making rather than on results.
For most of history, poker players did not have tools to review their performance. They had to rely on the feeling they had at the table and, at most, share their plays in conversations with friends.
Today, poker players have tracking tools at their disposal that make studying their game much easier. With these tools and solvers, we are facing the first generation of players who can review their plays and check if, indeed, their decisions are EV+ or EV-.
If we attribute our defeats to variance, we will internalize the errors that led us there, as we will not stop to analyze them if we consider that we simply had bad luck. Similarly, attributing all our victories to our skill means we do not analyze the errors that may have existed despite the good result.
That is why it is necessary to approach poker from a humble point of view. But it is not about being humble as a personality trait, but about understanding humility as a procedure. It is essential to evaluate our decisions before knowing how much they can cost us and not let ourselves be guided by variance when analyzing our game.
Read more Justice blocked more than 500 illegal gambling sites in Buenos Aires — CodigoPoker
