Aggregating Mistakes are Deadly
Poker, in a sense, is a long term game, meaning that no single round decides whether you win or lose. You can be forced out in a single round, but the overall reason would be due to poor choices in rounds preceding that. On the same note, just because you’ve won the last four rounds in a row doesn’t necessarily mean you will end up at the final table in the tournament. It is very important to keep a focused state of the mind while playing. You must remember to stay situated on the current round at hand, and in many cases the very move you are making at the moment. In terms of the overall game; later doesn’t mean a thing because there may not even be a later. You may even knock yourself out within the next few rounds with a very simple mistake. In poker, mistakes can be very deadly especially if they compound.
A good analogy for mistakes in poker would be that they can be like lies. You start out with one very small lie, but soon after someone realizes you lied; the lie then gets bigger and bigger and more lies compound upon each other as you fib more to keep the original lie in check. Eventually you find yourself caught up in a huge web of tangled shams and there’s no way out because you’ve dug such a deep hole. That is exactly how mistakes in poker work. They aggregate over time until either you finally run out of money; or you get knocked out. Take this example for instance; a few moves before you bet, or raised when you shouldn’t have and instead of backing out when you get the chance you decide to stay with your original move and very quickly plummet yourself through a losing hand; with much less money than when you started.
Don’t be afraid of mistakes either; everyone makes them even veterans of the sport, after all mistakes are what make the game profitable. The whole idea of the game is to play on your opponent’s weaknesses and use their mistakes to your advantage. No one is perfect however, which obviously means you will make mistakes of your own. The key is not letting your mistakes get any bigger than they should be. A veteran of the sport knows when to fold the good fold, and understands that sometimes losing even just a few chips isn’t the best decision in the long run. You need to pick and choose your battles carefully and you certainly don’t want to remain in the round if there’s a great chance the pot will be passed along to one of your opponents’. Learn to differentiate between the hands you should substantially back with chips, and those you should just sit out of. It makes perfect sense that if you’re giving away a few chips at a time and never get any back that before long you’ll be taking yourself out. So you definitely don’t want to bet or call every round and you most certainly don’t want to remain in often because then you’ll just be tossing away cash.
The common thinking of a novice close to the river when a large pot is before them is that they should remain in, no matter what it takes, especially because they’ve already bet so much. This is the exact series of compound mistakes that hits players and drives them out of the game. In the long run, you want to donate the least amount of money possible to your opponents’ because this will increase your chances of continuing in the game further. Which roughly translates to focusing on the move at hand and not betting, or raising, simply just because you already have so much invested. If you make a mistake, back out when you can. Don’t let your mistakes aggregate upon one another because then you will quickly find yourself standing in a very deep hole with no way out.
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Poker Mistakes
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