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Riddim
Moderator
Joined: 04 Dec 2005
Posts: 8176
Location: Sweden
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 Posted: Fri Jul 18, 2008 1:25 pm Post subject: Losing, and why you should learn to embrace it |
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To begin with, it's very impractical and counter-productive to have negative feelings associated with short term losses. From an immediate financial standpoint, it leads to tilt and risk aversion. Both of those things in turn lead to making less money, and they're actually so closely related that I'm going to focus on the differences rather than the similarities. While tilt is a temporary reaction that takes us below our A-game, risk aversion is generally a sort of preemptive tilt that lowers our profitability regardless of how close to our A-game we are at the time.
I think we're all familiar with tilt and how it relates to short term losses, so I'm just going to make one quick point. If you're thinking right now that you feel bad when you lose but you don't tilt, you're wrong. It may not put you on total monkey tilt or anything, but you're expending energy on something completely pointless. If you didn't feel bad about your losses, that energy would go towards making decisions instead. I can't think of a more typical and universally agreed upon definition of tilt than "playing worse because of an emotional reaction". That it isn't having a huge impact on your game doesn't mean it isn't tilt, just that you tilt less severely than some other people.
Risk aversion isn't talked about nearly as often as tilt, so I'm going to make a few basic examples of how it makes us win less money:
-It can affect the way we play a hand
Let's say that you're offered a choice between getting it in for a full 100 BB stack as a 60/40 favorite or just taking 10 BBs in profit with no risk. If you choose the latter you're a bad poker player. It really is that simple, because passing up on the 10BB in profit simply to avoid risking a buy-in is such a huge mistake. This is a pretty extreme example, but that makes the point of it clear.
The irony of this type of mistake is that the people who make them are generally the ones who can least afford to. They tend to be marginally winning or losing players who are trying to play well. Because of their marginal winrate, making up for a mistake like this will often take several hundred hands.
-It can affect the games we play in
If we're too scared of losing, we'll often end up passing up on profitable shots at higher stakes or waiting too long before moving up. Not sitting in a juicy game at higher stakes despite being able to lose a few buy-ins and still be comfortably rolled for our normal stakes is bad enough. Refusing to move up just because you're a bankroll nit however is just terrible for your hourly rate, both in the long term and the short term. Playing higher stakes won't only give your hourly a boost as long as you're good enough, it will speed up your learning process as well.
Also keep in mind that the games may not be as good if you wait. Just imagine if risk aversion had been your only reason for not moving up more rapidly pre-UIGEA. How would you feel today when the games are so much tougher and there's a chance they'll never be that juicy again?
-It can affect whether we play at all or not
Out of these three examples, this is the one I can relate to the most by far and it has cost me a lot of money. Usually when I'm not totally focused I feel like I have to pass up on playing because of one out of two reasons. The first is that I've had a good/bad run and I don't want to lose my winnings back/get deeper in the hole. The second is that I'm too worried that I'll tilt and lose a bunch of money if I run a bit bad.
The second paragraph in the previous example applies here too, which is why I feel like I just have to get rid of this tendency as soon as possible. I really don't want to end up bitter and/or angry, thinking "what if?" because I've waited too long and the games have gotten a lot tougher before I've even reached 400NL.
From an immediate emotional standpoint, having negative feelings associated with short term losses is bad because it makes us feel worse without any purpose. Feeling worse feels worse than whatever we felt before.
Now that we have that out of the way, let's get to the real reasons for embracing short term losses. First off they're unavoidable, so feeling bad about them is absolutely pointless. You're supposed to lose 80/20s, 90/10s and 95/5s. If you play a lot, you're supposed to lose a TON of them. In fact, you're supposed to lose a lot of them in very small samples too occasionally. "Big favorite" does not translate to "unbeatable". You know all of this already, but since we're all such **** idiots when it comes to reacting to variance, I feel that repeating it is justified.
In addition to being unavoidable, short term losses are absolutely necessary. Variance is not just a fundamental part of the game, it's THE fundamental part of the game. The one that lets us non-experts win significant money. Without short term losses, bad players would quit very quickly and there would be very few consistent winners left who were good enough to regularly get action from worse players. I don't really have a clue about chess, but I know that it's very hard for a mediocre player to make a living playing that game. The reason is that it's so easy to know when you're up against better players. A skill advantage pays off every single time unless it's pretty small (and maybe even then, as I said I have no clue about chess).
I'll end this with a little anecdote that fits the subject and helps emphasize the point of this post. Back when I used to watch Live at the Bike, the commentators had a habit of bringing up a quote, by Barry Greenstein IIRC. Apparently he'd told them once when he was a guest on the show that he actually had significantly more losing sessions than winning ones in his career. He made money by winning a lot more in his good sessions than he lost in his bad ones, rather than simply having more of the former than the latter. If this is true, which I'm pretty sure it is, not only can he not be sure of having a winning session when he sits down at the table, he's actually expected to lose. |
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drtre1987
Message Board Junkie
Joined: 07 Nov 2006
Posts: 2131
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| Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 9:45 pm Post subject: |
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| Nice post. |
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IamaYs
Pair
Joined: 31 Jul 2008
Posts: 38
Location: Dallas, Tejas
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2008 10:27 pm Post subject: |
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Great article, and I agree with you entirely that your mental state affects your play directly. For instance, if somebody beats you with a bad call you might feel like going after them to 'get your chips back.' This is bad thinking because once your chips are in the pot, they aren't yours anymore. Also, trying to go after a person because they beat you might hinder your attention to the whole game situation.
It's important to stay focused and roll with the tide. Play the hand your dealt to the best of your ability and be smart. |
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oldbutlivin
Banned
Joined: 07 Aug 2008
Posts: 11
Location: Kittery, Maine
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| Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 3:53 pm Post subject: |
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| great post. thanks |
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Flying_Kiwi
Message Board Junkie
Joined: 03 Sep 2006
Posts: 6534
Location: somewhere spacific
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| Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 5:41 pm Post subject: |
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| Only losers embrace losing. |
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greenruss
High Card
Joined: 13 Aug 2008
Posts: 8
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
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| Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 9:13 pm Post subject: |
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Great article.
I agree with everything u say.
Just difficult to stay positive when u lose like 8 $1 SNG tournies in a row to bad beats.
Maybe moving up to $5/10 SNGs would decrease the amount of bad beats? |
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Aron Norem
Pair
Joined: 27 Feb 2008
Posts: 35
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| Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2008 10:25 pm Post subject: |
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| Obviously everyone would rather win, but it's an impossibility. Also, other people have to lose in order for you to win. Learning to accept losses and have a "maybe next time" attitude will allow you to move on from losses much quicker, rather than taking them personally and having it effect your thoughts and play. |
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UFO1947
Alien Interrogator
Joined: 08 Jun 2006
Posts: 3322
Location: NS, Canada
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| Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2008 5:11 pm Post subject: |
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Hey Rid I thought I would post and say that when I reread this it helped me a bit, I have been able to soften the blows of losing lately.
still looking for a big win the counter balance the losses though |
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Moshiach
Message Board Junkie
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
Posts: 2279
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| Posted: Wed Nov 05, 2008 4:53 pm Post subject: |
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This is a good read, I wonder what the average ratio of winning:losing sessions is, if you could even make an average of that...
Edit: I suppose it's entirely reliant on the amount of hands played, the further a session is away from 1 hand, the greater the chance it will be a winning session.
Edit #2: I suppose you could graph this too, say you're a winning player at 5BB/100, you could assume that in a hypothetical 200,000 hand session it will be a winning session 100% of the time, then you could look at that session and see how many out of the 200,000 you lost so you could get a base percent for 1 hand, and from this break it into chunks of however many thousand hands.
It would be a good tool to see like, a 5BB/100 player can expect have X% winning sessions if the session size is Y.
Edit #3: I wonder where the 50% mark would be...
Last edited by Moshiach on Wed Nov 05, 2008 7:22 pm; edited 6 times in total |
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kcstoltz
Royal Flush
Joined: 27 Jun 2007
Posts: 629
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| Posted: Wed Nov 05, 2008 4:57 pm Post subject: Re: Losing, and why you should learn to embrace it |
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| Riddim wrote: |
To begin with, it's very impractical and counter-productive to have negative feelings associated with short term losses. From an immediate financial standpoint, it leads to tilt and risk aversion. Both of those things in turn lead to making less money, and they're actually so closely related that I'm going to focus on the differences rather than the similarities. While tilt is a temporary reaction that takes us below our A-game, risk aversion is generally a sort of preemptive tilt that lowers our profitability regardless of how close to our A-game we are at the time.
I think we're all familiar with tilt and how it relates to short term losses, so I'm just going to make one quick point. If you're thinking right now that you feel bad when you lose but you don't tilt, you're wrong. It may not put you on total monkey tilt or anything, but you're expending energy on something completely pointless. If you didn't feel bad about your losses, that energy would go towards making decisions instead. I can't think of a more typical and universally agreed upon definition of tilt than "playing worse because of an emotional reaction". That it isn't having a huge impact on your game doesn't mean it isn't tilt, just that you tilt less severely than some other people.
Risk aversion isn't talked about nearly as often as tilt, so I'm going to make a few basic examples of how it makes us win less money:
-It can affect the way we play a hand
Let's say that you're offered a choice between getting it in for a full 100 BB stack as a 60/40 favorite or just taking 10 BBs in profit with no risk. If you choose the latter you're a bad poker player. It really is that simple, because passing up on the 10BB in profit simply to avoid risking a buy-in is such a huge mistake. This is a pretty extreme example, but that makes the point of it clear.
The irony of this type of mistake is that the people who make them are generally the ones who can least afford to. They tend to be marginally winning or losing players who are trying to play well. Because of their marginal winrate, making up for a mistake like this will often take several hundred hands.
-It can affect the games we play in
If we're too scared of losing, we'll often end up passing up on profitable shots at higher stakes or waiting too long before moving up. Not sitting in a juicy game at higher stakes despite being able to lose a few buy-ins and still be comfortably rolled for our normal stakes is bad enough. Refusing to move up just because you're a bankroll nit however is just terrible for your hourly rate, both in the long term and the short term. Playing higher stakes won't only give your hourly a boost as long as you're good enough, it will speed up your learning process as well.
Also keep in mind that the games may not be as good if you wait. Just imagine if risk aversion had been your only reason for not moving up more rapidly pre-UIGEA. How would you feel today when the games are so much tougher and there's a chance they'll never be that juicy again?
-It can affect whether we play at all or not
Out of these three examples, this is the one I can relate to the most by far and it has cost me a lot of money. Usually when I'm not totally focused I feel like I have to pass up on playing because of one out of two reasons. The first is that I've had a good/bad run and I don't want to lose my winnings back/get deeper in the hole. The second is that I'm too worried that I'll tilt and lose a bunch of money if I run a bit bad.
The second paragraph in the previous example applies here too, which is why I feel like I just have to get rid of this tendency as soon as possible. I really don't want to end up bitter and/or angry, thinking "what if?" because I've waited too long and the games have gotten a lot tougher before I've even reached 400NL.
From an immediate emotional standpoint, having negative feelings associated with short term losses is bad because it makes us feel worse without any purpose. Feeling worse feels worse than whatever we felt before.
Now that we have that out of the way, let's get to the real reasons for embracing short term losses. First off they're unavoidable, so feeling bad about them is absolutely pointless. You're supposed to lose 80/20s, 90/10s and 95/5s. If you play a lot, you're supposed to lose a TON of them. In fact, you're supposed to lose a lot of them in very small samples too occasionally. "Big favorite" does not translate to "unbeatable". You know all of this already, but since we're all such **** idiots when it comes to reacting to variance, I feel that repeating it is justified.
In addition to being unavoidable, short term losses are absolutely necessary. Variance is not just a fundamental part of the game, it's THE fundamental part of the game. The one that lets us non-experts win significant money. Without short term losses, bad players would quit very quickly and there would be very few consistent winners left who were good enough to regularly get action from worse players. I don't really have a clue about chess, but I know that it's very hard for a mediocre player to make a living playing that game. The reason is that it's so easy to know when you're up against better players. A skill advantage pays off every single time unless it's pretty small (and maybe even then, as I said I have no clue about chess).
I'll end this with a little anecdote that fits the subject and helps emphasize the point of this post. Back when I used to watch Live at the Bike, the commentators had a habit of bringing up a quote, by Barry Greenstein IIRC. Apparently he'd told them once when he was a guest on the show that he actually had significantly more losing sessions than winning ones in his career. He made money by winning a lot more in his good sessions than he lost in his bad ones, rather than simply having more of the former than the latter. If this is true, which I'm pretty sure it is, not only can he not be sure of having a winning session when he sits down at the table, he's actually expected to lose. |
i been saying that after my first 6 mnths well stated  |
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BBCOACH44
Full Tilt Coach
Joined: 24 Oct 2006
Posts: 3792
Location: Indoor Practice...AKA...Da Gym
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| Posted: Wed Nov 05, 2008 5:26 pm Post subject: |
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How did I miss this .... 
Excellent Rid and Thanks for Posting..........  |
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phreeflo
Full House
Joined: 11 Aug 2008
Posts: 224
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| Posted: Wed Nov 05, 2008 7:21 pm Post subject: |
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| I remember this... this was a good post to bumb in case anyone didn't catch it the first time round. |
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Riddim
Moderator
Joined: 04 Dec 2005
Posts: 8176
Location: Sweden
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| Posted: Thu Nov 06, 2008 12:37 am Post subject: |
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Moshiach,
It also depends a lot on our tendencies. For example I (and a lot of other players) have the nasty habit of playing longer sessions when stuck and shorter ones when running really hot. Unless you tilt too hard this will generally skew the ratio quite a bit towards winning sessions, but the average loss will instead tend to be bigger than the average win. |
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gamblingparlour
Flush
Joined: 17 Apr 2008
Posts: 147
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| Posted: Thu Nov 06, 2008 1:07 am Post subject: |
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| Analyzing my losses is what makes me improve as a player. Psychology is such an important factor in the game. |
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DenverBroncos01
Three of a Kind
Joined: 27 Mar 2007
Posts: 78
Location: sitting with your chip stack
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| Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008 12:21 pm Post subject: In Order to Learn How to Win... |
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....you have to take some losses.
To that effect multi tabling has helped me quite a bit. When I take a brutal beat (and since I play $10 MTT's there are PLENTY of those) it helps to have other tables to focus on. In the long run this has helped me because I can tell myself that even though the donkey who just dealt me a blow on the one table really screwed me over, there's other tables I MUST deal with, and deal with right now. In other words, opportunity for swift recovery. If I can offset a bad beat on one table with another where I just took two others to the cleaners with the nuts, I'm ahead overall. |
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