Online poker has been around for years now but in more
recent times social media has expanded, most players now have a Facebook and /
or a twitter account and follow their peers, often providing updates on tournaments
and giving support to others, however it appears that the vast majority of
updates from amateurs are invariably rants about a lost hand or a particularly
player being a ‘donkey’.
I see people constantly post one sided posts, such as “I
just lost a huge pot with KK into AA I run so bad” yet the same person might
have won a massive pot with aces versus kings earlier in the MTT to put them in
that position, yet they don’t post this…why is that? I think it is mainly
because we are less likely to accept good luck in our favour than bad luck that
goes against us, we like to believe when we win it is mostly because of skill,
but when we lose it is down to bad luck, we don’t need to post when we flop a
set of deuces and stack AA but when we are on the reverse end we bemoan our
luck and proclaim it as a cooler. I also see people continually post beat after
beat after beat, claiming they are the unluckiest player in the world, yet they
can’t all be the unluckiest can they!
I have been guilty in the past of posting bad beats and
whinge posts, both on twitter and within forums, this is an area where I feel I
have improved, certainly the number of these posts has dropped, but there is
still room for improvement. To help me cut these posts out I have been thinking
about why we, as poker players, post these type of posts at all and the reasons
behind them and what benefits and drawbacks they may have.
Venting
Sometimes we suffer a bad beat or a cooler
in a crucial hand and we just want to get it out of our system, this is seemingly
a natural human instinct, but it does not change the events of said hand and
can only act as a reinforcement of the negative outcome which may lead to us
making poor decisions later on during the session or subsequent sessions if we
have a build up of these type of posts. It is usually better to try and push
the hand out of your mind and focus on the current hands with a clear head in
order to maximise your play in them and avoid making mistakes and / or going on
tilt.
Ego
The poker world is quite competitive and
when we take a beat it is easy to feel hard done by, that our skills have not
yielded the result they should have so we might make a post to make a statement
that our results are not as good as they should be through no fault of our own,
e.g. “I Just lost with AK to AQ for a massive pot on the FT bubble, I was going
to crush for sure”. Again this only has negative impact; we cannot control the
luck and should not be focused on short term results, only that we are playing
hands as well as possible. Even if we have a long string of results and are
going weeks or months of bad luck then posting about this run serves no
productive purpose, it can only harm our mindset and focus for the sessions
ahead, hence damaging any prospects of overturning the poor fortunes.
Sympathy
We all joined social media sites
to be able to interact with friends, so it is only natural to seek attention
and sympathy when hands don’t go our way, sometimes it is good to share
experiences and provide encouragement to each other, however overdosing on
hands of a similar nature any may lead to indifference from our friends, after
all they are probably playing themselves and are probably suffering similar
woes. In my opinion it is more constructive to spend this time discussing hands
where we might improve with each other rather than merely posting a beat
looking for a simple “Unlucky” reply from a friend.
Another common occurrence I see is players berating another
players’ play at the table, it may be that an opponent misplayed a hand and got
lucky, so the loser of the hand (or even a third player not involved) will
abuse the player and criticise their play. I can’t express how idiotic this is
on so many levels in my opinion, any poker player who wants to be successful
at the game should never criticise or abuse another player. Generally in a hand
a player will have either made a good play or have made a mistake, neither of
which should lead us to abuse a player as
I will briefly outline below.
If
our opponent has made a mistake, either knowingly or not there is no reason to
rub this fact in their face. Poker is about taking advantage of our opponent’s
mistakes, the less errors they make against us the harder it us for us to make
a profit, so by telling players they have made a mistake we give them the
opportunity to learn and this will diminish our long term profitability in the
game. They have paid their entry fee and they can play how they wish within the
rules, it is our job to take advantage of opponents playing styles to maximise
our edge on them. Sometimes their bad play will cut short our tournament but
that is the nature of poker, anyone with any skill level can get lucky and beat
anyone else. If you want to play a game where the best player wins everytime
then go and play chess, otherwise accept the inevitable beats with good grace
when they happen.
It might be that our opponent actually made a good play and
we do not understand why it was a good play, in this case we are likely to
think it was a mistake, although we may not be sure it was, in which case we
should use the same common sense in the previous paragraph but also attempt to
use it as a learning exercise to see why it might be a good play to help
improve our own game.
It may also be that our opponent made
a good play and we know it was the correct play, but we just happened to get
unlucky (or maybe made a mistake ourselves which the villain took advantage of)
in this case it is no fault of our opponent and so there is no need for any
abuse either.
I don’t believe there is ever a justifiable reason for
abusing players, further to this, new players can be immediately put off by
getting their play ridiculed and this will cut the number of new players
entering the poker economy, which is bad for us all in the long term, we need
all the players we can in the current economic climate! Poker rants and abuse
are indicative of leaks in our own game and usually do far more harm than good,
try to spend that energy on something positive, like reviewing hands or doing
some exercise (going to the off license definitely classes as exercise in my
opinion!). Thanks for reading, as ever feedback and comments are welcome! J
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