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Session Motivation Mistakes

Session motivation is exactly what it sounds like – it’s the primary reason that motivated you to sit down and play a particular session in the first place. Obviously, people frequently have multiple reasons for starting a session, but when we talk about session motivation, we’re talking about the dominant reason that drove you to play.

Session motivation is a massive force that resonates throughout every aspect of the session that follows. It defines your attitude, shapes the plays you are and aren’t willing to make (and also when you’re willing to make them), helps to set your tolerance for suck outs, your ability to stay calm in tough spots – in fact, there isn’t a single element of a poker session that isn’t touched by the motivation behind that session.

The majority of players who are nodding their heads at the above, however, aren’t likely to give their motivation a second thought when they sit down to play poker. This is problematic for players because, simply, there are great reasons for wanting to play poker, and there are terrible ones. Most self-observant players know that the sessions that start for terrible reasons are essentially DOA – unless you run like Cada, things aren’t going to work out well.

Five Terrible Reasons to Play Poker

The following five mistakes are listed, roughly, in order of their terribleness (from least to worst). It’s also worth noting that many of the below can (and often do) play a partial role in your motivation to play poker, and that’s fine – it’s only when they start to become the dominant reason you play that problems arise.

Playing Poker for Revenge
I’m a little ambivalent about this one. For some people, revenge is an excellent motivator – it gets them paying attention, thinking creatively, and really engages them presently in the game. Others, however, allow revenge to distort their game, resulting in a really myopic focus that prefers all information and situations that allow them to tangle with the target of their revenge, an approach that observant opponents will notice and exploit quickly.

On balance, poker playing motivated by revenge is going to be -EV. Playing poker well means placing the highest value on – actually, placing value exclusively on – winning chips. Revenge will often tempt you to make decisions where the value isn’t in winning chips, but rather in embarrassing your opponent, bolstering your own ego, threatening their stack specifically, and so on. Those decisions may sometimes result in you playing optimal poker – they’re not mutually exclusive – but since they’re not decisions driven exclusively by maximizing your profit, they’re (drumroll) … not always going to result in your maximizing your profit.

Playing Poker to Cure Boredom
Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, and they also do a pretty good number on otherwise healthy bankrolls. While it may share several characteristics with its arcade brethren, online poker is not a video game. It should not be, as a matter of habit, something you do to pass or kill the time.

Boredom is usually born of a certain mental sluggishness. The reason you’re bored in the first place is because you can’t think of anything to do. You’re not always like that (probably not, anyhow) – you can probably look back over the last few months and identify several times that you came up with something to do. The difference between then and now? Now you’re lazy, uninspired, mentally dull and physically lethargic (all to varying degrees).

Sounds like an excellent time to make precise, demanding decisions for large sums of money!

If you like to blow off a break in your work or a couple dozen hands on the sofa when you’re waiting for a show to start, no big deal. Just be aware that making a habit out of starting sessions when you’re at both a mental and physical low point is a pretty sure path to earning less money than you’re capable of.

Playing Poker To Impress Others
Let’s keep up the aphorism trend: Pride goeth before a fall. People who play poker know that some sessions are awesome, activity-laden, action-raging experiences, some are simply catatonic, and most are in-between.

However, when you’re playing poker to impress your friends (whether they be real or virtual), you’re going to feel some pressure to ramp up the highlight-maker. People don’t watch poker to see a lot of folding – that’s why the WPT just shows the final table – and they’re either expecting you to bust out some nifty tricks or you’re expecting them to be expecting you to. Either way, you run into value-creep again – you’re now making decisions based on a value derived from other people’s approval, instead of swearing full and deserved allegiance to the one thing that matters when you play poker – making the most possible money in a given situation.

Exacerbating the situation is that fancy plays tend to be expensive – sometimes very expensive. A buy in is a pretty tough thing to win, and all it takes is one super-bluff or hero call you never would have made in a normal session to blow one off. It’s just not worth wasting hours of work to prove to others how good you are (which attempting to do will generally ensure failure to achieve said goal anyhow).

Avoid situations where you’re asked to put on a show, or – at the very least – temper people’s expectations upfront.

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