Tuesday 2 November 2010

Battling the Demons (not mine)

The following was posted by one of my students in our google group. I thought it was awesome and worth sharing.........

"I've been on a downswing and tilting lately, I actually took about 2 weeks off from seriously playing. I needed to step back and reevaluate some things. I did a lot of thinking and I believe I'm ready to come back.

Tilt is when I stop playing against my opponents and I start trying to play against either myself, or against variance. I realized that when I'm tilting all of the reads, the focus, and sound play go out the window. Sometimes I honestly forget the other players are even there. It isn't really about trying to beat my opponents anymore, I'm fighting a battle against variance or myself.

This is a waste of time. Variance is undefeated. I can't beat it. No matter what I do there's going to be suckouts, runs of bad cards, downswings etc. More importantly it's my friend. Without variance there wouldn't be poker.

Even worse is trying to play against myself. For me mainly it's beating myself up over mistakes and losing confidence in myself because of it. I looked at my mistakes as a total loss, instead of realizing there's a lot to gain from them. Also instead of being so critical of my own game, I need to turn that focus outwards and look at other people's. Find and exploit the mistakes they're making.

From now on whenever I feel like I'm no longer playing against my opponents I'm just going to close Full Tilt. Because that's the reason I log onto FT in the first place."

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