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11:33pm: Poker can be brutal sometimes. No, scratch that: poker can be down right evil at times. The cards don’t care if you just got two outered 3 times in a row, or if you’ve just lost 9 consecutive coin fliips. This is because the cards have no memory. They also have no mercy. Many have lost tuition, cars, homes, or even families because of the cruel nature of the game.
We all know It can be a pride swallowing, ulcer-inducing siege. Ever go through a stretch where it seems like not a single pocket pair will hold up when your opponent shoves his chips in and flips over two overcards? Ever go through a stretch where you consistently get your money in as a decided favorite, only to take a dagger in the heart when the river card strikes?
Are you losing faith in the percentages? In the game?
If this sounds like things you have thought recently, there could be multiple reasons:
- Taking too many coin flips
- Not putting in enough volume to let things “even out”
- Failing to practice “pot control”
- Our tendency as human beings to remember with greater frequency and accuracy the times of extreme misfortune rather than the times that the percentages held true.
Whatever the case, there’s no mistaking the fact that it doesn’t feel good when these times fall upon us. So how is one expected to cope in these situations? It’s definitely not easy. It takes an extremely mentally tough and mature person to endure these times.
Something that usually helps is to think of casinos. If a casino set up a blackjack table, and only dealt hands for one hour a night, it is entirely possible that the casino could have a losing night. Fortunately for them, that’s not the case as casinos have anywhere from 5-50 blackjack tables running at any given times, each dealing 5-6 hands at a time. They do this because they have to. The edge in blackjack isn’t significant enough over the course of 1 hand, 10 hands, 100 hands, or even 1000 hands to be able to say for sure that the casino will profit. However, you can say with relative certainty that after 100,000 hands that the casino will be in the black.
This is the beauty of heads up, and specifically — the beauty of playing multiple tables. When you only play one game at a time, you have to play twice as long for your variance to even out as you would if you were playing 2 tables (provided that there is no significant drop in quality of play from the added load of another table). So while poker can and will be overly brutal to you at times, no matter how you cut it - if you’re a skilled player with a significant edge over the average player: you need to at least give some serious thought into increasing the number of tables you play. Otherwise, you may not stand a fighting chance against the brutality.
Start a Clean Slate at a New Room, a New Sharkscope, and Keep HFL Free in the Process