The more I play poker, the more I find situations in it which mirror ‘real life’, to the point now where I find myself, often without realising, comparing situations to poker scenarios.I think this is because poker has a mixture of elements including skill, strategy, knowledge, people, psychology and luck. As does ‘real life’.
I also believe that the approach each of us takes to our lives is mirrored in our style of poker play.
Your personality and poker
For example, my style of poker, although I am working on changing this, has always been tight-aggressive. That is, I usually wait for good cards or situations and then play them hard. Aside from situations where I’m tilting, I don’t tend to take huge chances or try and out-aggress opponents. This is also true in my outside life – I’m fairly cautious and predictable in my activities.
From a poker point of view, being TAG and ‘nitty’ in choosing which cards to play is fine to an extent – however it results in being predictable (which your opponents, if savvy, can exploit), and failing to ramp up the aggression at critical points in the game, being too passive/defensive, means less chance of accumulating chips and therefore winning. I believe this is a key factor in my break-even/losing runs.
Likewise in ‘real life’ I’m often poor at seizing situations, acting on my ‘reads’ of situations/people, or taking a chance rather than worrying about what may be.
In poker, as in life, we all have a standard strategy or style that we stick to, through familiarity and because we feel or know it to work best for us. Perhaps we always take the same route to work, eat lunch at the same time each day, etc.; in our poker game we always only play X% of hands during the early game and so on. This gives us a structure and reassurance – with it though it also creates routine, boredom and predictability.
Opting to make changes to our life, as with our poker games, is often hard – we may know that things need to change however we get stuck in patterns of familiarity and security, even if those patterns aren’t giving us the results we want. Often we stick with these patterns for years until something happens which forces us to change.
Being successful at poker involves being able to be criticised by others (e.g. coaches, other players we have asked for help) and ourselves. Not only taking the criticism but acting on it and being positive about it. This is the same in life, be it in a work environment (perhaps at appraisal time), or in sports or hobbies.
Don't get complacent!
Doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get different/better results is backwards, but often feels easier/less challenging than accepting we need to change and taking action on it.
When we’re doing well in life, when everything seems to be going our way, it’s easy to get complacent and forget things weren’t always like that. I compare these times to upswings in poker – your ITM rate is good, ROI’s going fine, you seem to be getting dealt AA all the time and all your pocket pairs are flopping sets.
There are two risks when things are going really well in life and poker – one is forgetting things weren’t always this way and won’t always be that way; secondly assuming that your current success is all due to you, rather than luck, other people or other external factors.
In poker, often when I’m running well I don’t bother checking hand histories or putting time into watching learning videos etc. I assume that I’m running well purely because I’m a ‘good’ poker player.
I’m not saying that good times aren’t always because of our actions, but in poker and life the tendency to get complacent and attribute anything positive to ourselves is very tempting.
Conversely when things are going badly, we can often blame ourselves, or look at things the other way and put things down to luck or other people. “It’s not my fault I’m having a bad month, I’m just not getting the cards”, “it’s because the tables are full of donks”, “I keep getting sucked out on”, etc.
I did this yesterday whilst running bad, sat there tutting and being rude on chat at people, then took the time to go over my games today and realised that whilst I’d had some crappy luck, I’d also played some key hands really badly.
Take responsibility
In life, again it’s so easy to blame things on anyone or anything other than ourselves. Aside from being (quite often) wrong, this also risks us not learning from things and therefore doing exactly the same thing over and over, each time getting more annoyed. Actually accepting our errors and mistakes empowers us to change our approach and get better results – so too in poker.
When things are going badly we quite often forget that things were good before and will be again (I do this all the time) – the same with poker during a downswing or bad session (“my aces always get cracked” etc.)
Although we all know at whatever level that life (and poker) has patterns, it’s difficult dealing with them because they aren’t all linear and we can’t safely predict everything in our lives. We know roughly when each season will start and end but we don’t know when our loved ones might die, when we might win the lottery, when we might walk along the street and find a £10 note, when we might wake up, get out of bed and stub our toe first thing.
Love the game
But that randomness and lack of predictability is what makes life (and poker!) interesting. Every situation we experience in our lives is slightly different. Sometimes this isn’t obvious (we go into work every day with the same people at the same times etc.) but nothing is exactly the same as the minute before it.
This is one of the reasons I love poker – even after having played, maybe 10,500 games, it still fascinates and interests me – different players, different hands, different situations.
In poker and life we can never learn too much about people or ourselves. And in both we can either opt to play a tight, safe strategy, a loose, reckless/aggressive one, or one in which we adapt to each situation and the people around us.