Don't Be Results Oriented

Despite twenty years as a professional gambler, I still need to remind myself not to be results oriented. 


What does it mean to be results oriented? And why is this such a bad thing?

A winning gambler judges a play based on its merits or its long term expected outcome. 


For example, I recently played the following hand:





Villain was a mega whale, even by the standards of PLO $25. The preflop action went like this :

I opened to 85 cents, he three bet to $2.80, and I four bet to $8.65. He called with $9.53 behind.

Now investing half your stack with Kh4h33 is not usually a great idea. He is in particularly bad shape against my hand because I have a three. Of course, Omaha being Omaha - and my own hand being a very weak category of aces - he still has a decent amount of equity. We are 70%-30% in fact. Actually, that isn't far off from where he should be. Against a 4% range he would have 32% equity.




Still, you definitely do not want to be putting in half your stack with such a substantial disadvantage. He will flop "the best hand", i.e. 50% equity only 20% of the time. As you can see, our preflop advantage is going to carry itself forward onto the flop. And when he doesn't flop sufficient equity to continue on the flop, which will happen around 60-65% of the time, he will either have to make a negative ev call or fold.




Unfortunately this particular flop was that rare 10% of the time that he flops a monster and doubles through me. C'est la vie.

However, the point of this post isn't the bad beat that I took. And really, getting outflopped when your opponent has 30% equity isn't that much of a bad beat. Especially at $25 PLO, when your opponent doesn't even have a full stack. The point of this post was my reaction to the beat. I took it in stride. It didn't bother me at all. Well, I shouldn't say that. Bad beats are anger inducing and frustration inducing. But I was able to be equal parts happy at the same time. Because when your opponent plays like this, three betting with a trash hand and calling a four bet, that is - as I believe I have just thoroughly demonstrated - a great thing.


Yesterday, I suffered an extreme mental game breakdown. I was chasing my losses all day. That's bad. Really bad. But today I had a mental game victory. And that is good. The mental game is my biggest weakness. I'm a strong technical player in a soft field with lots of fish. The only person I can't beat is myself. I must improve my mental game. And the only way to do that is by working at it. By testing it. 





























 

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