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Session Motivation Mistakes

Playing Poker to Recoup Losses
Most poker players are probably familiar with the questionnaire for Gambler’s Anonymous. I forget what number it is, but there’s a question on there that basically asks if you’ve ever gambled in an attempt to recover losses.

There’s a reason why that question is there. Playing to win back money you already lost is flat illogical, so people who answer in the affirmative are allowing their urges to overwhelm their common sense.

Sitting down to play poker with the attitude that your goal is to win back money you lost last session is a sure-fire road to tilty town. It happens easily enough: You sit down thinking “ok, I had a lousy day yesterday, but today I’m going to erase that session with a massive win”. You start off well enough, and then you get a good hand cracked. You start playing a little speedier and blow off another half buy in. You right the ship and grind back, and then have another hand cracked or move picked off. Then you start blowing off the buy ins until you finally force yourself to stop the bleeding and shut down the client.

When expectations don’t line up with reality, people freak out, some a lot, some a little. When you expect to win money in a session, you’re setting yourself up for a freakout, because you cannot control whether or not you win money in a given session. You can only control how well you play. Once you start putting emphasis on your won-loss for a session (especially if you start off focused on it), you will not be looking at the big picture. You’ll again become myopic, letting your balance for the day dictate your emotions and decision-making.

There’s nothing wrong with taking a loss and using it as motivation for playing better next time. You should – heck, you need to – do that to play poker for a living. Just make sure your motivation is calibrated to focus on improving your play, and not on recovering money that, if you think about it, can never really be recouped anyhow.

Playing Poker To Feel Better About Yourself
I left this one for last because in some ways it’s the sneakiest of all terrible session motivations. It contains aspects of a lot of the attitudes described already, so some of this discussion might seem a little repetitive, but bear with me, because there’s something really valuable in this idea.

Being good at what you do is awesome, as is being proud of that ability. In a lot of games, skill and results are tightly correlated: more skill equals better results, even over pretty small sample sizes. Poker, especially tournament poker, is not one of those games. The result is that people often confuse things and take pride in their results and not in their play.

Doing something you’re good at to shake off a bad mood, to clear your head, to boost your ego, whatever – that’s all fine. Playing poker to achieve any of those goals isn’t. That’s because even the savviest players have trouble feeling good about a session where they lost money – especially significant amounts of money – and played well. On the flip side, most players have no problem feeling good about a session where they played poorly but won money.

Since a lot of sessions are going to be losing ones, sitting down to play poker with a goal that can’t be met unless you win money is a terrible starting point for a session. If you don’t agree, think about whether the following chain sounds familiar to you: You feel lousy. You sit down to play poker. Things don’t go well. You feel worse. You play worse. Things go worse. Remember, most people don’t have the fortitude to quit a session the minute they sense things are off. Most people have trouble quitting when they’re stuck.

Don’t ask poker to give you something it’s not equipped to provide. Poker can be fun, poker can be stimulating and poker can be mind-bogglingly harsh and soul-crushing. If you were depressed and your doctor prescribed you a pill that could have any of those effects on your mood, you’d probably fill the prescription and stash it away for the next weekend you were free, but you’d look for another solution to your depression.

People Aren’t Perfect, and Neither are You

The primary problem with all of this advice is that a lot of people live stressed, neurotic and pressure-filled lives. If they waited for a time to play poker where none of the above applied and they felt super-on, top of their game, ready to go, they’d probably be playing poker … once a month.

That’s assuming they were able to when the moment hit them.

The above are all leaks. They’re not fatal for your game – you can be a winning player and have several, if not all of them – but they are draining money from your bottom line. The pragmatic approach is to use the list as a starting point, and try to get a sense of which particular poor motivation you have most often, and which seems to result in the biggest hit to your profit.

Most players, upon reviewing a year of play, will find that an overwhelming amount of their total losses for the year come from just a few sessions. If they had the ability to go back in time and precisely take their emotional temperature at the start of those sessions, I’d wager they’d find that most, if not all, were driven by one of the terrible motivations we’ve covered. I’d further wager that, given the choice to change that initial decision to sit down and play, most, if not all, would grab it in a heartbeat.

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