[dankhank]

I really believe that everyone has the "psychological fortitude" to manage the vicissitudes of the game. It is simply a choice. A choice to change the way you think about results. Stop thinking in terms of winning as good and losing as bad. The two concepts should be grouped in your mind exactly the same.

what's revelatory is the dissonance between this post and numerous posts such as the one irie made. for me, this post struck a deeper chord in terms of the open-ended fate that will be each of our poker careers, coupled with the myriad options (and yet the best option is often so simple) we have while sitting at the table.

consider this: giga wrote that just because one person doesn't achieve the same thing he does, that that doesn't make one a winner and one a loser. this is very different rhetoric than the sklansky maxim "remember, above all else, we are playing poker to win money."


Practice trusting yourself, you will be wrong enough in the beginning to doubt yourself, but don't let that stop you.

what this post did, actually, is relax me into trusting my game me than i did an hour ago. i had a slight losing weekend - ending a two month rush - and i felt like i wanted to walk away from the tables for awhile, partly to protect my winnings, partly because i felt myself not playing as well as i can. playing too recklessly, too loose, too bluffy, too apt to tilt after a bad beat/result.

i also just had a week where i blew off some online profits playing drunk at two relatively tough club games. this post made me feel, concretely, "okay, you really need to be sober when you play there tomorrow."

this post relaxed me in a way that similar psychological-bent posts have done, but only partially. the theory put forth here, in a vague way, is more totalizing than other such posts.

have you really been paying attention?