So Why Didn’t I Leave?
The story I’m about to relate should be so familiar to most readers that I feel pretty comfortable telling it in a severely abridged form. I was at the casino playing some no limit holdem. I was up a modest amount after 5 hours of play. A small voice started nagging me to leave. I lost a hand and told the small voice that as soon as I won that small amount back, I’d leave. Then I lost another small hand, and I told the small voice that we’d split at the next dealer change. But by then I was only up a small amount, and that somehow became a justification for waiting until the next dealer change. A few hands later I bluff off my stack to a tight player holding a straight flush, and what should have been a small win instead ended up a decent loss.
Now of course I left after the big hand, and I guess there’s something to be said for doing that instead of rebuying on tilt. But the precursor question here is, why did I stay long enough to lose the hand in the first place? I had to know what I was heading for; it’s happened to me in the past more times than I can count. It wasn’t just a small voice either; I could feel my back starting to stiffen up, my concentration starting to relax, my hands displaying a desire to fidget - all clear flags from the body that I’m no longer playing my A or even B game. If you’re like me, you’ve made multiple promises to yourself, all very solemn and definite, as you’re walking out of the casino [or shutting down the computer] following a potentially profitable session that went sour at the end. The wording of the promise, and the amount / power of profanities, might vary but the principle is always the same: I KNOW when I should leave, and from now on I’m going to leave when I get that feeling.
Ahh, the lies poker players tell themselves.
In addition to the hit this irrational desire puts on my bottom line, I have a genuine academic curiosity as to why I don’t leave when I know I should. Of course I have some ideas, but I’m curious to see what others think first. So I decide to ask the internet [google]: “why don’t people leave a poker game when they know they should?”
The first promising looking return is an article from Card Player [LINK http://www.cardplayer.com/poker_magazine/archives/?a_id=14286&m_id=65546] by Alan Schoonmaker. I scan through the article, and it ends up being more about how to identify when you should stay and when you should go. Good article, but I already know when I should go. The problem is that I just don’t act on that knowledge. Alan offers some good “rules” for when to leave, but I’ve tried systems like that and I just break them.
That was about it for my super-specific search approach results, so I try to be a bit more general: “unable to leave a poker game”, “can’t leave a poker game”, “problem walking away from a poker game.” I get a few more decent articles from Schoonmaker on anger management, and far fewer “hey, you’re a gambling addict” hits than you would expect [oddly, the anti-gambling lobby doesn’t have the search engine placement prowess of commercial poker sites], but still, most relevant articles focused more on how to know when you should leave. Then I find a little gambling Q&A column Mark Pilarski does for the The Detroit News [LINK: http://info.detnews.com/casino/columns/details.cfm?column=pilarski&myrec=79] where a reader asks why they have such a hard time leaving the casino with a win [the reader plays house games, not poker]. Mark replies:
“But sometimes the casino’s BIGGEST advantage is not the built-in casino edge, but PLAYER GREED. That’s what keeps players from quitting when they are ahead, and that’s what builds those casino high-rises. Winning can be the easy part, but keeping your winnings depends on your ability to walk. The casino gives you this opportunity: take your best shot at their money, and walk with it-if you’ve got iron self discipline.”
So Mark thinks I don’t walk because I’m greedy and because I lack self discipline. Those are pretty obvious answers and I’m surprised that it took me a few searches to find them. I’m sure greed plays some part in my desire to stay past my time, but that doesn’t seem enough of an answer. I’m not, in poker or in life, particularly frantic about money, and when I lose I’m rarely upset about the money so much as I’m upset about losing. The lack of self-discipline is clearly a correct answer, but it’s not an explanation as much as it’s a rephrasing of my original question. It’s along the lines, more or less, of someone asking you “why is that man burning?” and you replying “because he’s on fire.”
I head for the search results past the first two pages and wade through some forum posts from people who had the same frustration as me, but still no answers. Two things start to become clear about my problem: one, it’s a fairly common one, and two, very few discussions feature analysis about what the underlying causes are. Finally I come across an article from the good folks at flopturnriver.com [LINK: http://www.flopturnriver.com/Psychology-Of-Losing.html], credited to “aokrongly”,
called “The Psychology of Losing.” It’s fairly up the middle stuff, but it offers two more potential culprits for my irrational behavior. Here are the snippets that catch my eye:
“Boiled down to it’s absolute essence, losing Hurts! Not in an abstract way, but in a very real way. It makes your stomach churn, changes your blood pressure, constricts thousands of muscles and causes physical and mental anguish […] when humans experience pain and discomfort we want to make it GO AWAY!! How do we do that? […] The best way to make the pain of losing go away is to WIN!!”
“I don’t know the secret to happiness, but I DO know the secret to unhappiness. It is UNFULFILLED EXPECTATIONS.”
I recognize something pretty useful in that first bit right away. While it doesn’t explain how I’m able to ignore the initial urge to leave, it does provide a solid explanation for why I continue to stay even when it becomes overtly obvious that my time is up. If losing is painful, losing after you made the choice to stay when you could have exited with a win is doubly so. Once you seriously consider leaving, I think part of your brain books whatever amount you’re up at that point as a win, even though the money is staying in play. That helps to explain why I often find myself trying to win back ridiculously small amounts of money before I’ll be “willing” to leave - I’m trying to get back to an inflated even line, set to however much I was up when I first heard the “leaving voice.” In this mind set, even leaving with a win can feel like a loss. That sounds pretty damn illogical when you say it out loud, but I’m sure plenty of people reading this can relate all too well. Also, reframing the stress as a physical and not just mental phenomenon helps as well; if you think of the problem as being strictly ego-related, you might be contributing the problem by doing nothing to solve the physical causes or, even worse, contributing to them with stimulants like caffeine.
On to the second bit. Don’t let yourself be fooled by all the uppercase letters and exclamation points [I was at first], because I think the secret to my problem is lying right there in that line. Well, maybe not the secret in it’s entirety, but it sure seems like the closest thing to a logical, compelling explanation anyone that I’ve been able to track down in my, ahem, exhaustive search.
Expectations. This makes the sense. I don’t listen to that voice because I only have a modest win, and I expect more than a modest win, dam nit. This makes even more of the sense when you consider that this problem of mine is pretty much unique to live play [these days]. Live play requires me to make a bit of a sacrifice, even though the boat is only a half hour away. I have to drive, get on a wait list, sit in a less comfortable seat, see a ton fewer hands per hour, and get in arguments with incompetent floor persons. PLUS I can’t check my email. I mean, how much is a person supposed to be able to take? And I put up with all of that for 8 hours just to carve out a win smaller than the average pot of the game I play online.
I imagine that’s about the tone and tenor of the response my frustration and disappointment generate when the “leaving voice” pops up. Now that I think about it, I can recall snippets of the above popping into my mind while debating an exit, but I’ll be honest - I always chalked just about all of this problem up to a bruised ego, and never fully realized the basic nature of the conflict surrounding my decision to sit put or bolt. A large part of it has to come down to the difference between what I expected to happen when I decided to go to the casino that day and what actually happened. Apparently I’m willing to go to irrational lengths in an attempt to get my expectations and my results to line up.
With that small but significant realization in hand, I figure I’ve done enough poker introspection for the day. I could obviously ask a seemingly unending string of additional questions - why do you have unreasonable expectations, how can you align your expectations to a reasonable level without undermining you confidence, and so on - but right now I’m content to have a concrete answer to my problem. It might not be the perfect one, but it’s someplace to work from. Besides, the whole point of this article was to get me to work on my leaving skills, and right now I hear a very reasonable sounding voice telling me that I should quit writing this and get to playing some poker.
