Preparing to Win

by Lou Krieger

Every poker player wants to win. But willpower alone is not enough. In fact, too much willpower may even be detrimental to one's game. After all, poker is not like those "World's Strongest Man" competitions that fill the TV sports programming hours when no major sporting events are being contested. Will power drives those guys. Sometimes it's all they've got left to hoist a 350 pound Atlas stone up and over that last inch of wall. Strong as these guys are, it's often a game of inches and the force of one's will decides the outcome of many of these events.

But in poker the will to win - that unmitigated desire to drive one's self to the wall and beyond - can lead players to make bad decisions. In a strong man competition it's you and that stone and the wall. You have to lift it or you're history. But in poker, you don't have to play every hand - or even most of them. One must first decide which hands to play, and because of that it's brains before desire, judgment before will, and knowledge before power.

But knowledge alone won't get you there. Success demands thinking, and thinking at the poker table in the heat of battle can be enhanced by a period of preparation - preparation for winning. How you think about the game, and what you think about, can make all the difference between winning and losing in the long run, regardless of how deep one's knowledge base may be.

If you are new to poker, or if you've never really studied the game or taken it seriously, your task is clear: learn the basics and learn them cold. It's not all that tough nowadays. You needn't go any further than the back pages of this magazine to see advertisements for a gaggle of books designed at improving your poker game. Some are better than others, to be sure, but if you've never taken a systematic approach to improving your poker before and want to change your losing ways, pick a book, any book, and start studying. Even if you get one good suggestion from it, you will have gotten your money's worth.

If you know what you ought to be doing but you're just not able to do it, you've got a much tougher row to hoe - one that usually means making behavioral changes while ridding yourself of learned habits and old paradigms. If you have the knowledge but just can't seem to hit the target when you pull the trigger, you've got a know-how problem, and preparation is often the key to unlocking this door. Knowledge, plus preparation, equals know-how, and that's frequently what it takes. Here are a few things you can do to change your behavior and bad habits.

Be responsible for yourself. If you are not in control of your own actions, how can you ever hope to win? So don't ask for a deck change just because the cards are not falling your way. Cards have no mind, no memory, and they don't choose a seat or a player and then jump around magically to deliver your adversary great hands while leaving you with those that are second best. A new set-up won't help. And the dealer is not responsible for the cards you're dealt or how you play them. While the random nature of how cards fall is beyond your control - or anyone else's for that matter - there's only one person accountable for how well you play. And that's you, big guy. You are responsible for yourself. I'm not, the dealer isn't, and neither are any of your opponents. The buck stops right in front of you, and when it comes to your decisions at the poker table, you da man.

Step one in making behavioral changes and eliminating bad habits is the irrevocable assumption of personal responsibility for what happens to you at the poker table. If you blame poor results on forces outside of yourself, you have not committed yourself to making changes; you're just denying the problem. And the only solution for that is to come back when you grow up and take responsibility for your own actions!

If the shoe fits, steal it! Find a role model, or better yet, a couple of them. And make sure you're looking at the right things too. Dangling gold bracelets, nugget rings, buffed fingernails, Rolex watches, and the ability to riffle an entire stack of chips with consummate ease only amount to talking the talk. If you want to learn to walk the walk, look at players whose game you admire and try to find out what they do and how they do it. See if you can learn the secrets of their discipline. Find out how they resist the temptation to play marginal hands in bad position. Learn how they keep from going on tilt, and discover how they exploit the table when they have the best of it.

A friend of mine who is a very successful mid-limit hold'em player immediately gets up from the table and walks around whenever he takes a bad beat. Sometimes he walks around the casino, other times I've watched him walk the parking lot. But it allows him to cool down and regain control of his emotions. Some people think its foolish, but he is a consistent winner and he's in the game every day. Many of his critics are on the rail.

I've adapted this "time out" technique to suit my own style. Whenever something at the table upsets me, I get up, stretch and flex, touch my toes a few times, splash some cold water on my face, bounce a few times on the balls of my feet, take a good, athletic stance and walk back to the table with confidence and enthusiasm. It works!

Build relationships you can trust. This is not easy. You'll find plenty of people you can talk to in any cardroom, but damned few you can absolutely trust to speak openly, honestly, and truthfully with you. When you find someone like that, build and keep the friendship so you have a safe harbor where you can discuss your play and problems. You will each improve as a result of reinforcing one another. But you have to be willing to give more than you get in any relationship, and cardroom relationships are no exceptions.

Ask the right questions. Some people persist in asking the wrong questions - even when they know they are incorrect. If you persist in asking, Why can't I win? Why do I always get the bad beats? Why does the idiot in seat five always win with aces, and I always lose with them? you're simply asking the wrong questions. They lead to self-defeat because the vary heart of these questions are based on an assumption that life at the poker table is beyond your control, and we all know it's not. When you acknowledge that you are responsible for your actions at the card table, you might ask instead: How can I keep applying the winning strategies I've learned? What can I do to continue to prepare to win? How can I increase my winnings by recognizing and eliminating the "leaks" in my game? If you ask yourself questions based on a paradigm acknowledging your locus of control, your mind automatically directs itself toward positive suggestions. Because you have told your mind that you do exercise control over your actions, it will suggest strategies to you based on this assumption. Learning will begin to take place implicitly, often without your even being aware that some degree of learning is taking place.

Contrast this with the "Why can't I win?" question, where's there's nowhere for your mind to go, and nowhere to find a positive answer when you're operating on the assumption that you have no control over the results you achieve.

We can all spend a lifetime working on these four suggestions because there's always room for improvement. In fact, as the number of skilled players continues to grow, there will probably be less of a knowledge gap between players at all levels. But some of us are going to continue to get the money, while other knowledgeable players will continue to lose. And the difference just might be these behavioral characteristics that separate consistent winners from the also-rans.