How Not to be Results Oriented

Human beings aren't that well adjusted to playing poker. In the modern western society, we're conditioned to think that we're masters of our domain, architects of our fortune and we can achieve anything our heart desires.

Poker teaches us that while we do have control over our actions the outcomes are often outside of our reach. Once you recognize variance for what it is you, can't unsee the effects it has and you quickly realize that we're often subjected to it both in poker and life outside of it.

Variance

"You can be anything you want to be" has to be one of the biggest illusions in the modern world. While we're slowly waking up to the negative consequences of similar mindset the narrative stating that we're entirely in control of our own fate is still the prevailing one.

It's obviously true we can (and should!) do a great deal to better ourselves and our circumstances, but putting the emphasis on the outcome instead of the work necessary to achieve it, can result in a nasty web of cognitive dissonance the first time we're faced with the adverse effects variance can have on our life.

If you decide to become an athlete and dedicate yourself to become as good at 100-meter dash as you possibly can be, you'll still most likely fail to achieve results possible for genetic outliers like Usain Bolt. In similar fashion, your genetics (or simply the fact that you've been born on the wrong side of the bell curve when it comes to results players with your skill level can achieve) might be one of the reasons holding you back from becoming the next OtB_Baron.

However, in both of those cases, you'll most likely be able to become much better at 100-meter dash and/or poker than the vast majority of the population which has a lot of value in and of itself. Unfortunately, the belief that you can outrun Usain Bolt's genetics or outplay the standard deviation, can leave you bitter and decrease your performance.

Win Rate

Poker players tend to obsess about their win rate. We identify ourselves as "3bb/100" player "10bb/100" player etc. While it's important to have a rough idea about our ability in order to evaluate the profitability of certain decisions (like adding more tables to increase hourly, moving away from a soft field in order to maximize ourrakeback on another room etc.) we often act like we know exactly how good we are at any point in our career.

In reality, you can never know your exact win rate. What's even more mind-boggling, even if you somehow knew your exact win rate there's absolutely no guarantee you'd earn the amount of money that win rate should allow you to win even after millions and millions of hands.

If you quickly plug in some basic data into poker variance calculatorand simulate careers of 20 different ultimate grinders with win rates of 10bb/100 and 10 million hands played throughout their poker careers you'll see that even though they have exactly the same skill the results between the worst and the best run will be vastly different. Amazing but different.

Hand Results

One of the basics mistakes many beginner poker players makes when it comes to being results oriented is including the showdown of a hand they post in a line-check forum thread. Even if said hand gets evaluated by a seasoned player who's used to looking past showdowns having access to the perfect information about the results of the hand can still "poison the well" and decrease the quality of discussion around said hand.

Again, we're conditioned to be results oriented and even if on average poker players are much better at suppressing this kind of mindset it's tremendously difficult to replace it with a different default and therefore preventative measures like removing the showdown results from a hand in line-check thread are absolutely necessary.

Cashier

Our conditioning when it comes to being results oriented becomes especially obvious when we catch ourselves constantly looking at the cashier or 'session results' tab while playing poker. While this won't be true for everyone the vast majority of players could benefit from decreasing the frequency of looking at one's results.

Again, just like with win rate, it's necessary to have a rough idea about the state of your bankroll in order to make informed strategic decisions (this is doubly true if your bankroll management strategy is particularly aggressive) but obsessing about the moment to moment changes in your bankroll can only do you harm in a game in which a hundred thousand hands is still considered to be relatively modest sample size.

If you're going to focus on short-term results you're going to draw some poor conclusions since even a 10bb/100 crusher can experience a few bad sessions in a row. Using a very simple analogy, every minute you spend on measuring your biceps could be spent on another biceps curl or quality recovery which, unlike the act of measuring can actually affect the size of your muscle.

Similarly every second you spend on looking at your winnings in Poker Tracker could instead be invested in something that can actually affect your balance (not to mention the positive effect the change will have on your mindset). Some people might be mostly unaffected by the knowledge of their session winnings so as always it's best to stay self-aware and pick a solution that's best for you, that being said you might want to experiment with removing the 'session' tab in your tracker and hiding the cashier in your poker room.

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