Avoid Mistakes - Variance is Overrated (My Almost 1K Post)

Nice post overall, and I am as guilty as the next guy of compounding my losses by letting variance get to me and playing bad as a result.

Originally Posted by Micro2Macro

... bad variance is overrated and the mistakes that you make at the table will have a much greater impact on your win rate than getting those ace’s cracked or whatever cooler you run into during your grind.

So true.

Originally Posted by Micro2Macro

It's hard to remember what it feels like to play good again - so you can't play good. I think the reason is because again, we associate playing good with running good. Our brains have been tricked into thinking about it all wrong, and all we can do is accept it, be aware of it, and attempt to trick ourselves into realizing that running bad and playing good can both occur simultaneously, but so can running good and playing bad.

I'm not a psychologist either, but I think this is absolutely key to it. Although we all try not to be results-oriented, at the end of the day we measure our success by our winrate and the amount of money we make. Thats why gambling is so addictive - our brains become hardwired to crave that "winning feeling". The more objective and dispassionate you can train yourself to be, the better your chances of playing your "A" game all the time. Maybe we should all just pretend its Monopoly money??

Originally Posted by Micro2Macro

I've found that the weird thing about poker is you can play really good, still lose, or play really bad, and end up winning. Basically, how good you are is just an illusion - we don't really know how good we are, because the cards are the final determination of results.

This is complete bollocks, and doesn't make any sense at all in the context of the rest of your post. The first sentence is right, but the whole point is that its right because of variance. When you discount variance, how good you are and how well you play compared to your opponents should be the ONLY determinant of your winrate. Its not an illusion at all. Otherwise we might as well play roulette.