Another motivation to play poker is ego: “I’m right and you’re wrong.” A lot of people don’t have anywhere else they can express those sorts of thoughts without fear of some sort of reprisal, either.
Finally, whenever someone loses a hand and they think (rightly or wrongly) that your inexpert play caused the loss, they will be feeling not only less wealthy, but also angry and upset, and they will want to vent that feeling towards the person who “caused” the problem.
These factors combine to make it a virtual certainty that you will run into people who criticize the way you play whenever you venture out of the safety of your home game and play card casino poker. How you handle that criticism will go a long way towards determining not only how successful you are at the poker table, but also how much you enjoy playing poker.
If you let the critics “get to you,” that is, throw you off, get you angry, or put you on tilt, your money results will almost certainly suffer. The quality of your experience will also suffer: your fun afternoon or evening of poker will turn into a series of bitter, angry confrontations. Don’t you already have enough of those in the other areas of your life? Do you really need to have that be a part of your recreation, too?
On the other hand, it is, without question, very difficult to sit at a table and listen to someone who at least SOUNDS confident and/or experienced make a withering dissection of your play. Without help, or a strategy, one has to be quite evolved to sit there without this attempt at public humiliation having some sort of effect.
So today I’m going to give you some tools and suggestions on how to ignore or laugh off your poker table critics, and on how to turn the tables on them, by using their own criticism as a means of defeating them.
The starting point, and the mantra that you should recite anytime someone starts criticizing you and/or your play, is this:
If your critic really was an expert, and you really were playing badly, the critic would have to be a fool to try to embarrass you.
A lot of people leave the poker table when faced with constant criticism. If you really are a bad player who figures to lose a lot, a good player would be foolish to risk running you off. So step number one is to realize that your critic, for all of his or her self-assurance about his or her poker skills, probably isn’t a winning player. Your critic is not someone who plays poker for money. Your critic plays for some other reason, and so the criticism isn’t necessarily coming from someone who knows what he’s talking about, even if the analysis sounds vaguely logical.
There are rare exceptions. Occasionally a really good player just wants to win so badly that he or she gets very upset when a big hand goes down, and that player perfectly analyzes exactly what you did wrong. If you know your opponent to be a consistent winner, perhaps someone with an impressive poker resume, then simply note what he says and use this outburst of temper against him. Listen to the lesson and don’t make the mistake again. Your expert opponent’s temper has just cost him some money.
The vast majority of the time, though, your angry victim is just angry. Let’s try to guess why. There are plenty of possible non-poker reasons for the anger, but I can’t begin to cover them all here: let’s stick to poker possibilities.
Possibility number one is that your opponent is losing. He might be a winning player normally, but he’s losing at the moment, and can’t handle it. The criticism is a nice alert that this player is having a tough night. He might as well paint a target on his chest after that, because the good players sense an opportunity. It’s not always the same kind of opportunity—some steaming players call too much, some raise too much—but the opportunity is there.
Possibility number two is that your opponent is a long-term losing player and can’t understand why. He or she has read some poker books and play the way the authors suggest, and can’t beat the game. Because he respects the poker author, and because he knows himself to be a smart person, he assumes he is losing because he is unlucky, because “idiots and morons” make plays that he can’t predict.
Really, now—how many times have you heard someone who was a consistent winner berate a consistent loser? It doesn’t happen very often. So you can pretty much assume that your critic is trying to take his problems out on you. Unless the player is really obnoxious, and keeps it up for a long time, I tend to let this sort of thing go. I play poker to win, and players who lose consistently make that possible. I don’t want to chase them away.
Also, by listening to what they say about how you played badly, you’re learning exactly how they play, how they think. They might as well be handing out not merely free poker lessons, but a “tell” on exactly where they will be later, because it’s pretty hard for them to scream at you that you’re a fool for playing 4-5 suited in an early position and then later make the same move themselves. So if they come in early, they probably have something that a small card flop didn’t hit. Nice of them to tell you that. Probably explains why they have so much trouble beating the game.
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You'll soon discover who the strong players are at the table. As tempting as it is, try to resist the temptation of trying to beat them at risk of losing sight of the other aspects of your game. You'll lose big time if you're not lucky. If you're lucky enough to win, it'll hardly be worth the effort.
