Apathy or unquenched desire?

[shaniac]

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I can say that Jimmy has made a definite slide since he's become more apathetic. When he played the PCA and Aussie tournaments he was wound so tight, and HUNGRY to win. Since then, he's lost the burning desire and it's affected his game quite a bit.


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This just illustrates the importance of taking the good runs in stride, too, and to actively balance that necessary hunger-to-win with an awareness of the larger picture.

[0evg0]

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and yeah, it is about the competition. why do you think i talk so much [censored]? why do i berate every other "good" player? Why do i spend like 8 hours a day on 2+2? Cuz i gotta prove to everybody including myself that i can be the best at this silly game. The sick part is, i actually feel like i'm getting there.

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stopped reading after this w/ leo's posts.

perfect.

[Todd Terry]

I wrote this a while back in a thread about life on the tourney trail:

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Be prepared to be losing most of the time. I busted in the first two events I played as a pro, which were fairly deep stacked events, in under 30 minutes. I'm currently on a 16 tournament streak without a cash. You have to walk a fine line between being brutally honest with yourself and not simply chalking up bad results as bad luck while at the same time recognizing when you are playing well but not winning and not make changes solely because you are not winning. You will frequently have doubts about whether you can make a living playing tournament poker, which might go away after you cross $5 million in gross career earnings, but I doubt it.

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IMO, succeeding in MTTs takes unquenched desire to succeed along with enough apathy to emotionally handle the swings, but not so much that you don't do everything you can to improve your results.

[Bakes]

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Your "lofty and noble goal" seems to involve a lot of levels of human interaction that are unpleasant in my view, and I personally wouldn't direct much of my energy that way. Obviously, you can do what you want with your life and career, but it's not my style.

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I don't direct a ton of my energy into being vocal, but it certainly provides a good release. Poker makes me incredibly pissed at times, it makes me incredibly happy at times. I don't consider it an unpleasant level of human interaction when its banter between rivals that doesn't result in any damage.

prob just a difference in personality/age/environment/what have u just like every other difference between humans

[Jurollo]

god i [img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img] you shane. awesome posts here. also sorry about my headphone volume at foxwoods, haha.

[freehat]

I think having an apathetic mindset towards your results in MTT's is essential for long-term success in this form of poker and in your long-term mental health. MTT's are addictive in nature due to their payout stucture which is on a variable ratio similar to a slot machine. Pulling a slot lever and the short-term results are out of the user's control. Results in tournaments will largely be weighted to who wins those coinflips when the blinds rise and the short-term results are not really up to the player's control. I tend to think of tournaments as playing cash games with the stakes keep increasing or a form of martingale blackjack system with slight edges that will take a long time to manifest itself.

For those who make big scores early in their career it will be hard to continue when they start regressing to the mean. It is much more psychologically damaging to go from 500,000 to 100,000 than from -300,000 to 100,000.

[nath]

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- no, i am not the DeebSpellCheck gimmick [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img] I think it might belong to Nath though...

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it's not me

Leo is right of course and right now he and I are talking about what he mentions in his first post (and what I feel is a major, major impediment in the development of some players on this forum)-- namely that some people would rather be known as a good and unlucky player, and are afraid to get their money in bad and look stupid. Meanwhile they sit back and criticize people they think of as clowns without even stopping to think that maybe they're doing something that, if not technically IMMEDIATELY +EV PERFECT POKER ZOMG, DOES in fact help them win TOURNAMENTS.

But people aren't really interested in hearing this. I've told a few of you this already and you've blown me off. So I'm going to go join the lucky clown camp.

[Bakes]

Why don't you be more specific? All this vague stuff does nothing for me....are you implying that -EV moves are necessary to be a good player?

[bobneptune]

hi clayton,

your poker skills are way above mine, but when you are having these types of concerns, it might be helpful to look at the experiences of some of the great winners in sports and see what we can learn from them.

the great bill russell wrote a book years ago called "the russell rules" where he goes into 11 concepts that lead to winning. one of his first couple of quotes is one which is so simple, yet quite elegant. he says:

"the game is on the schedule... we have to play it.... why not win it?"

it sounds so simple... whether or not you may want to be in a certain tourney in a certain place at a certain time, you are here... it makes no sense to cheat yourself not to use all your skills and abilities to prevail.

the second winner i'll quote is joe montana. in the 1989 super bowl, montana and the 49 er's found themselves trailing by three on their own 8 yard line with the ball with 3:20 to go in the game. he trots on the field with all hell breaking lose in his huddle with teammates screaming at each other.

he grabs tackle harris barton aside and looks in the stands and asks him,"isn't that john candy up there ??" everyone in the huddle shuts up, looking at montana like he has 3 heads. then he turns to the rest of the huddle and says, " is there another place on earth you'd rather be right now ???"

of course, they drive the ball 102 yards and win the championship, but his meaning was quite simple and elegant once again.... embrace the challenge.

i think this is the sort of attitude one need to have in order to be successful at tourney poker, or any other endeavour.

it never hurts to emulate champions to learn to become one , yourself.

[nath]

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Why don't you be more specific? All this vague stuff does nothing for me....are you implying that -EV moves are necessary to be a good player?

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I'm saying that you need to play hands and situations very differently in a tournament than you would in a cash game, because the need to accumulate chips is so desperate. So you need to be more aggressive with your hands and you need to attack weakness, and you need to move at pots where you have any decent equity and can win a big one-- and ANY time you think you can make people fold, you should. Taking a pot without showdown is the surest way to not be outdrawn. Many people want to think that just waiting around for their big hands and always getting the money in good is enough, but it's not. You simply don't get enough hands to take that approach and have consistent success.

I personally prize getting the big stack in tournaments because it gives me the leverage to pressure people and boost my folding equity-- and it gives me a healthy cushion if I lose a pot. I try not to play for large chunks of my big stack in marginal spots, but I will flip short stacks for small pieces of it all day. I'll move in on draws against smaller stacks all day. So what if I'm 25% or 30% to win when called? That's great-- they fold so often that I usually have enough equity when called to make the move +EV on the whole.