Just Losing...

Sometimes you sit down at the poker table and whatever you do you just can't win a big hand. The problem is whenever you play poker you expect to win. But what happens if you know that either you will lose $500 or $100 after several hours of play...which would you choose? Yes, of course the -$100, but its hard to accept that when you really want is to win $500.

The acceptance of the possibility of losing is hard because we just don't like to lose and it goes counter to our expectations.

Recently I played in the Madness Cup at Advanced Poker Training. Interesting concept where you are playing against another player, but its not heads up. You both play 100 hands against bots. You and your opponent get the same hands and the same bots. Whoever wins the most (or loses the least) wins that round. Thats the hard part. For that streak of 100 hards, you can easily lose, so the goal is to lose the least amount possible. It really was tough for me to understand that because it goes against what you need to do in a tournament like setting, but it is what your mindset needs to be. Maybe for a real tournament you can't have that approach all the time because once your chips get to zero, then you are out. But in a cash game, this is something to keep in your mind. Not only how to minimize your loss for a hand, but to figure out how to keep the losses for your session to a minimum.

The question that does pop into my head is...are you leaving money on the table if you are trying to minimize a loss? For example, if you flop a set and there is a draw on the board and lets say you have position and your opponent checks flop and turn and river...and you bet on the flop and turn (and get called) and on the river the draw gets there...do you bet or check? What if you bet and get check raised? If you are trying to minimize losses for this session, I would just check at the end (in the case that this session hasn't been going so good). Or maybe make a value bet at the end if the session has been going good.

Luck does run in streaks, so even though it edges on superstition to take that in account when making decision like the aforementioned, I do think it is necessary to add that dimension to making that action.