Strategies for avoiding cascading errors
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Poker players make mistakes for a variety of reasons – a lack of information, an off-kilter emotional state, a patch of temporary insanity, and so on. Each time you make a mistake, you probably spend some time immediately afterward playing detective in an attempt to uncover the root of the error. This type of reflection is critical, as it helps you identify flaws in your approach that can help reduce the amount and severity of future errors. However, the same reflective process that can help your game in the long term can do immeasurable damage to your game in the short term if you’re not careful. Focusing too much on a mistake you just made can increase your level of frustration, lower your confidence, kill your focus and undermine your image at the table, inviting a cascade of additional errors that often cause far more harm than the original blunder. This phenomenon is particularly damaging in tournament play, where you generally don’t have the luxury of taking a break to deal with an error away from the table.
So what’s a poker player to do? How can we best strike a balance between giving mistakes enough attention to ensure that we learn something from them, but not so much attention that they lower the quality of our play in the immediate future? The simplest answer is to develop a quick, rigid process for dealing with errors as they happen. As with any type of cognitive re-wiring, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, but I can offer a basic outline of the process that has worked for myself and other players that I know, and you can fine-tune it as you see fit to better suit your needs. My process involves four steps: Qualifying, Identifying, Remedying, and Closing.
Step one – Qualifying
While it might sound a little ridiculous to some, the first step in quickly analyzing an error is to make sure it’s actually an error. I generally put things that go wrong into one of three categories – dealer error, player error or opponent error. Let’s face it, sometimes you can do everything right and still lose a massive pot. When you lose, despite doing everything correctly, it feels like you’ve done something wrong. Take a second after things don’t go your way and ask yourself: did I actually do something wrong, or did the deck or my opponent behave in ways I couldn’t control? Worrying about legitimate mistakes is enough of a burden without adding the weight of bad luck or bad play by your opponents to your stress load.
Step two – Identifying
If you determine that you’ve actually made a mistake, the next step is to quickly identify the basic flaw in your approach to the hand that resulted in the error. Sometimes mistakes are the result of several flaws – in that case, just pick the major ones and don’t worry about the rest. After all, you can only solve so many problems at a time, so there’s no point in identifying every single leak in your game that contributed to an error. For example, let’s say you call a raise preflop with K5s, flop top pair with a weak kicker and end up paying off an opponent all the way to the river. In this case, your basic flaw might be overvaluing weak suited hands preflop or not being able to re-evaluate the strength of your hand post-flop. If you can’t figure out a flaw in your play that led to the error, then it might not be an error at all – head back to step one and make sure you actually did something wrong.
Step three – Remedying
This is probably the easiest step of the four. All you need to do in this step is to quickly sketch out the basic lesson you’re supposed to learn from the error. In a lot of cases, this doesn’t take any more effort than just rephrasing the flaw you identified in step two (and maybe adding a quick action step). To continue with our K5 example from earlier, you might conclude that you need to absolutely fold weak suited cards to a raise until you learn to handle those hands better, or that you should attempt to use flop bets and raises to define the strength of your hand while the pot is still reasonably sized. Whatever the lesson is, just make sure it’s brief and logically connected to the underlying flaw in your play.
Step four – Closing
If you’ve done steps one through three correctly, this step should come fairly naturally. Mistakes tend to nag at poker players because they feel like a waste of time and chips, but completing the above process ensures that you at least get something concrete for your efforts – a clear understanding of your flaws and a plan for correcting them. It won’t always be that simple – sometimes mistakes will continue to bother you for other reasons, such as the embarrassment you feel for appearing weak or foolish in front of players, or due to unrealistic standards you hold yourself to as a player. If mistakes continue to bother you even after you’ve dealt with them rationally, you need to commit some time away from the table to deconstructing the emotional reaction you have to mistakes.
Mistakes are an inevitable part of playing poker. The fact of the matter is that you simply can’t stop yourself from making mistakes – but you can work to control the impact those mistakes have on your game. Don’t let yourself be a player who can’t handle the occasional error or two, or you’ll quickly find yourself in the company of countless would-be pros who are capable of playing their A game when everything goes right, but immediately revert to a state of donkdom when faced with the slightest challenge or obstacle.
