[Supwithbates]

Very good post.

I think my problem is somewhat different than those of others. To me, it's less about the money, and more about pride. All my life, I've striven to be the best in whatever passion I've had, be it sports, video games, whatever. In everything I've ever pursued, results have been correlated with skill and effort.

In poker, I've put down a lot of effort, and I think I have a lot of skill to back it up. Unfortunately, my results haven't always been great, and this is almost a knock at my pride. Whenever a fish takes a pot off me, I start saying to myself "this guy is so bad he doesn't deserve to win a pot off anyone ever!"

So I wait impatiently for the best hand to stack a fish, and sometimes I do stack him, but when he sucks out on me, I get angry... "I can't play better than this, this isn't fair, I'm better than him, why did he just beat me?"

If the fish stays around, I can generally stay calm by just looking at the fish as my money, rooting for him to win pots off others, knowing that he's next to dead money to me if he stays at the table. But then he loses all the money to someone else, leaves the table, and I'm sitting there quite angry that a fish got the best of me.