To be a winning poker player you have to learn to lose!

Posted by Marcus Bateman 24/02/10

Everybody hates losing. Everyone who has ever put in serious hours at the poker table knows the pain of running bad and losing when you should be winning, and dealing with the losses that poker throws at you is arguably the hardest aspect of poker.

 

Being able to keep playing well in the face of extreme adversity is the hallmark of all the truly great players, and is a feat which is extremely important to master if you want to ensure long term success.

Losing is a fundamental part of poker, and one that you have to not only accept, but be able to deal with if you want to survive.

A good way to think about this is to consider the effects of losses in different forms of poker. Different forms of poker have different severities of loss, with tournaments much easier to deal with than cash games, and a game like limit hold'em being vastly easier to cope with than one like pot limit Omaha.

This is because the scope for losses in cash games is much higher, and the variance (and therefore the possibility of large scale loss) is much higher in Omaha than it is in hold'em. The larger the possibility of loss, the tougher mentally a game is to deal with. Many players who spend a month grinding solidly at the cash tables can lose all of their profits plus interest in one night of madness - something nearly impossible to do if you are a tournament player (where your buy in is the most you can lose).

There is no magic formula to learn to deal with losses. The best advice out there is simply to have a break and get away from the tables. Your perspective of poker in the middle of a big losing session is very different from the one you have a day or so after.

Losing is a fundamental part of poker, and one that you have to not only accept, but be able to deal with if you want to survive. I would always back a mentally stable, non creative grinder over an unstable - yet technically genius at the table - player, as the grinder will not fall apart in the face of adversity - a point that ends up as huge sums of money in the long run.

By Markus Bateman 

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