The ride home or the walk to the hotel room is the worst ever. All you think about is what you could have done different. You become your own worst critic. Every play dissected. Every hand criticized. “Where could I have gotten out without losing so much? Where could I have bet to win a hand?”
The real question is how much critiquing is too much?
The Wrong Thing To Do:
After a losing session, it is easy to say that there is something wrong with your game. This is called results based thinking. One losing session is no reason to change your game, style, or strategy. Bad results are not a sure fire sign that something is wrong with your game. A donkey chasing a flush draw all the way to the river and hitting it can ruin your day just as easily as bad play can. The best and worst thing about poker is that playing correctly does not always equal a win. It’s what keeps the donkeys playing and the rest of us taking their money. Don’t be too eager to plug every hole in your game that you think might be there after a loss. You will only convert your play to beat the table that you just lost to when your play should be tailored to beat everybody.
The Right Thing To Do:
It is always good to study your play after any session. If you don’t have the sickness that allows you to obsess over every hand, long after they have ended, it can be a good idea to take notes during your poker games. When playing with a friend, try to get together and breakdown each other’s play. Objective opinions often can carry more weight than your own biased thoughts.
An actual conversation between my wife, Mrs. Scoop, and me after a loss that she witnessed from the rail:
Me: “Man I just couldn’t get the cards tonight.”
Mrs. Scoop: “Why would that matter? You didn’t play well at all.”
Me: (dumbfounded) “How? Every time I had cards some donkey would hit something stupid.”
(That’s called expert analysis on tilt.)
Mrs. Scoop: “You didn’t play aggressive. You didn’t try to bluff and you just didn’t play like yourself at all.”
Me: (Still dumbfounded) “Hmmph.”
I had played incorrectly that session, but was not aware of it. It didn’t mean that my game or my strategy was wrong. I just didn’t stick with what works for me and my bankroll suffered. Try to focus on specific plays and hands to track the performance of a particular move, especially one that you are using for the first time. Try to figure out where you went away from your game plan. What caused that? What got you out of your rhythm and how will you avoid that situation in the future?
The best thing to remember after a losing session is, do not panic. I’ll say it again, DO NOT PANIC! We all lose. We have bad months and losing streaks. The key is to fix what’s wrong, keep what’s right, and come back to scoop a monster.
- Kirk “The Scoop” Zimmerman
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To have a good poker strategy, a poker player should have a conscious or unconscious understanding of odds and expectation.
