[Student Caine]

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You can't learn anything from your results.

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Not true. If you suck at poker, your results should be bad. If you are excellent at poker, your results should be good.

So if your results are bad, there's a higher than normal chance that you suck at poker.

2p2s insistence on attributing results (usually downswings) only to variance by saying things like "You can't learn anything from your results." is nothing more than not taking responsibility for your own results. You played the hands, the results are yours! Good or bad, they are a direct result of how you played the hands.

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AMG! Teh Grunch! This thread is now officially l33t!

You know the longer that I play this game the more I realize just how many "contradictions" or "it depends" situations there are. The results oriented thinking vs non-result oriented thinking thing is one of those. Results oriented thinking can be beneficial if it is used constructively. Unfortunately all too often we, as inexperienced players, tend to abuse or manipulate the "results oriented thinking" in some vain attempt to make ourselves feel less bad about our losses. I know for me the progression has gone something like this:

1. [Results oriented] "Dammit, I am losing money when my aces keep getting cracked by rivered two pair and flushes, maybe I should just check down to the river and then bet when I am really confident my hand is good."

2. [Non-Results Oriented] "So I couldn't get value with my big hands and my bankroll suffered. I read somehwere (2p2, a book, irc, wherever) that we should play our big hands fast. Wow...I just lost 100BB when Villain flopped a set of 7's to crack my AA and shoved 96BB into an 8BB pot. Oh well, that's just bad variance (i.e., the ever famous "cooler")."

3. [Results Oriented] "Ok, my big hands are either winning me small pots or losing me big ones. So the next logical thing is that I will only play my big hands to the felt if they make two pair or better! Otherwise I am going to play them slowly."

4. [Non-Results Oriented] "Well, I just called a huge preflop 3-Bet with 66 on a flop of 234r when I shoved my overpair and Villain called with AA. I read on 2p2 that we have to play overpairs strongly so this was just a cooler."

Etc., etc.

The moral of my little 4 act play is that it is very easy for us, no matter what situation or phase of our development that we are in to blame bad beats, coolers, cold decks, what have you...in, as I stated before, some vain attempt to salvage a positive feeling about how we play...and I think that we allow this mindset to cloud our thinking.

Should we shove our overpairs or call re-raise shoves with them? There are so many more factors than just the fact that we have an overpair - how does villain play? how does villain view us? It cannot be "overpair/standard shove/whine about cooler".

As The Grunch stated, results are important. But it is how we apply these results to our development as poker players that is most crucial. If we allow a bitter downswing to cause us to start folding AK UTG then they are hurting us. If we allow a bitter downswing to cause us to stop playing and go back to our recently played sessions and look at both losing hands (to see if there is anything we could have done to increase our equity in the hand or decrease our losses) and winning hands (to see if we could have increased our value) then we are using the results in a constructive manner.