[eanderson85]

The reason you can’t play chess for real money is because the best player wins. We can play poker for real money because fish like me can suck out once in a while.
Your Jacks were an 81% favorite. That means you lose 1/5 of the time. That’s okay. That means that the next time they are going to call with eights and you’re going to win. You have to think long term and not be results oriented. You got it in good. That’s all you can hope for. You might think your aces get cracked all of the time, but when you look at your database, viola’, you win 81% of the time. Crazy how math works.

[jim]

Hi @George we get this question a lot! I think, as Eric points out, bad beats are going to happen a certain percentage of the time. It would be weird if we WEREN’T getting the worst of it from time to time – and there’s really no panacea for that, other than just telling yourself that it’s variance and that it will equalize over time. In fact – it might NOT even equalize over time – it SHOULD – but some players will end their career having won more flips than they ‘deserve’ and some will end their career losing more flips than they ‘should’ have and that just stinks but it’s part of what makes the game great, too.

One thing that has helped me – MTTs in particular are very nasty about variance, because the outcome of the entire tournament can depend on one coin flip 5 hours in. The effects of the ‘luck’ of that one runout isn’t confined to that one hand, but instead your entire tournament. One of the things I like about playing cash is that if a hand doesn’t go my way: it’s just that one hand. Maybe I lose a buyin on a bad beat, but I can go take a walk and shout something vulgar in the parking lot and then come back and start playing again and each hand is a game unto itself – there’s no chain reaction that affects my entire day of poker like there is in a tournament setting. So if you haven’t dipped a toe into cash play instead of MTTs maybe look into mixing it up a little now and then and see if it appeals to you. Start at the lowest stakes until you feel comfy and you might find that there are times when you want to embrace the variance/excitement of MTT poker and other times when you just want to relax and enjoy some disconnected hands pf poker instead – you never know!

This helped me, anyway – reach out directly if you’d like to talk more about it, or to talk about other aspects of the mental game, anytime. And thanks for posting this in the forums! We all benefit from sharing this kind of thing with each other. Keep it up!

[george]

Thanks guys. The support helps. I got back on the horse last night and finished in the money. So all is well with the world again. Sunshine and flowers.