LOSING WITHOUT BEING A LOSING PLAYER

Unlike sports though, in ring game poker, every hand is it's own universe. You, or opponents, can quit after any hand, possibly never to be seen again. The advice from Vince Lombardi at the top of this article doesn't completely literally apply to poker. Only an idiot thinks he should win every hand he plays. But his advice does apply to poker in the long run. The key thing is that doing things right is not a "once in awhile" thing. If you want to be a winning poker player, you should be doing things right all the time -- and right does not mean getting lucky or doing things that work out profitably even though you thought about them wrong. Right means acting in the most sensible, logical, mathematically favorable way possible based on the information you have available.









What really distinguishes poker from other games is how some you can lose even when you do everything possible right to a very extreme degree. If on a A77 flop, a player goes all-in with AA against another player who has 22, and the turn card comes a deuce, and the river card comes deuce so the final board is A7722... the player with the AA will be the "loser" in the hand, and may even be eliminated from a tournament, but that player did not play losing poker. He may have lost the hand or the tournament, but he played winning poker.



The AA versus 22 example makes the point rather obviously, but this phenomenon occurs to a smaller, even microscopic, degree in hands, sessions and tournaments around the world every day. Losing doesn't mean you played losing poker. It doesn't mean you didn't do things right. It doesn't mean a player isn't playing with the habit of winning. And, just because some luckbox or lousy player who gets lucky has a winning session or takes down a tournament doesn't make him a winner.



In fact, many apparently successful ring game and tournament poker players are total, busted losers who are in action because someone is staking them in hopes of getting a debt back or because they know the busted person occasionally plays exceptionally well, even though he is a loser in the long run.



Spectacular flukes don't make someone a winning player, except in a past tense way. It is possible for an extremely poor player to be literally the luckiest person on Earth for a few days and take down millions in a poker tournament. This would make that person literally a winning player on an accounting sheet, or in the eyes of the IRS. But one second after that player sucks out for the last time to win that tournament, he reverts back to being a losing poker player.




Not winning a hand doesn't make you a losing player. Not winning a tournament doesn't make you a losing player. What makes you a poker loser is the habit of playing like a loser. Don't do that. Play like a winner, even when you don't win. Act like a winner, even when you walk away from a tournament table when you have been eliminated.