Being at one in Texas Hold’em
When you play Texas Hold em cash games then you are going to have to get used to periods of time where very little happens. This is actually not a negative event as such but yet it is often perceived that way by players who expect too much from the game. These are usually players who are pretty good players in terms of knowledge but who are relatively inexperienced in terms of playing the game. I have always maintained that a player is not really experienced until they have been through a really bad negative run and come through the other side.
This then means that the player has more than likely been through the worst that the game can throw at them and lived to tell the tale. But when millions of players sit down to play in any one session then they expect to win. If you are a winning poker player then your expectation is to win but that does not make it guaranteed. If you have played 1000 sessions of poker and won 600 of them and lost 400 then you have a roughly 60% chance of coming out ahead in any one session. This is hardly a massive edge and if you were to walk into a strange room where 60% of the time nothing happened but the other 40% of the time you were punched in the face then you would hardly enter that room with confidence.
It is like this with poker but yet too many people simply do not see it that way. But poker does reflect life very accurately because some people get upset at events that happen to them that other people would see as minor. Like being cut up by another car for instance, this is a minor event but yet many people enlarge this in their own minds and this is how road rage happens. The problem is that when you get angry at minor events like these then there are going to be a lot more minor events than major ones.
This means that you are really going to be angry all the time or at least a very large percentage of the time. This is like getting angry at minor events in poker and these could be losing individual pots or even perhaps nothing happening for an hour or two where you are merely recycling money. We can take this a step further and look at individual sessions or even losing weeks. A losing week is obviously a fairly major negative event but even that fades into insignificance when compared to a losing month.
So what we perceive in life and in poker to be negative is highly individual and subjective. An event that someone perceives as negative would hardly register at all with a more tranquil person who had a more laid back personality. Getting upset at little things is not a good poker trait because many little things in succession will go wrong simply because this is all part and parcel of poker.