Stop Whining and Start Winning

The main pitfall of being identified as a Poker Coach has always been the whining.  It is as if there is a neon sign above my head that says "Vent all your frustrations here."

While I do welcome the opportunity to do players the sounding-board service, there are limits to it.  I haven't defined the limits, maybe I should.  One article I read long ago was written by a coach who gave guidelines on how and when to tell bad-beat stories.

I do not recall his guidelines, so I made some of my own:

1. Your bad beat story must actually qualify as a bad beat - you are allowed to get this wrong the first time, and you will receive a primer on the differences between coin-flips, coolers, draw-outs, and bad beats.
2. You have five minutes to tell me your bad beat story.
3. Do not begin to tell your story until all your facts and the sequence of events are straight.
4. You cannot repeat any bad beat story you tell me to anyone else.

Is your bad beat story really worth telling?  Or is your listener going to shrug and say "meh, standard"...?

These guidelines are not just there for the sake of my aching ears, they are there for the sake of the storyteller's health.

The first rule is there because I want students to have the appropriate emotions for the appropriate events.  I do not want them to feel like the entire world is conspiring against them just because they lost a hand that they were actually a slight underdog to win.

"I shoved with AK and he called with pocket threes!  Unbelievable!  I can't catch a break!"

The second rule is there because I don't believe in drawing out drama.  I believe in feeling an emotion, expressing it responsibly, and letting it go.  My personal experience - not only with bad beat storytellers, but also with people who are in a life-funk in general - is that the longer they sit inside that emotion, the harder it is to get out of it.

The more you churn, the more you burn.  Man, do I know some major churners!

Five minutes means less churn time.  Five minutes also means the emotional expressor has a responsibility both to himself and his listener.  We are having this conversation because I want to pull you out of your funk, so don't spend all your energy trying to pull me into it.

The third rule is there to protect the storyteller from flying off.  It keeps us all in touch with reality.  When told properly, the story can be taken in a proper context, and we can feel better about it. 

"I raise from the button and this guy who hates me 3bets a ridiculous amount...!  No wait, I think he raised and I reraised and he 4bet...anyway, we are all-in by the turn, but the flop was..."

Exasperating.

First of all, you don't know that the guy hates you.  Second, if you recall that his 3bet sizing was about quadruple your initial raise, you might see that it was still quite standard.  Third, yes, you opened and he 3bet.  Fourth, you need to clue me in on what hand you had before you tell me about the post-flop action.  Fifth, you need to tell me about the flop and the actions before you tell me about the turn...


In my attempt to get the complete situational picture, I am also attempting to ground the storyteller.

A lot of times, the storyteller feels a lot better once he has taken the time to get his story straight.  Instead of being re-raised by "an asshole who hates his guts," he realizes he was up against a decent player who had a better hand.  That was something he was too busy metagaming to see at that moment.

The fourth rule is another anti-churn measure.  You came to me, you vented, we felt bad together, then we moved on together.  Let's move on.  Retelling the story for any purpose other than as a learning example serves up a double whammy.  One, you travel back in time to the place where you felt bad.  Two, you take someone with you.

The story is in the past, you are in the present, and the future is ahead of you.  The sooner you stop whining, the sooner you can start winning.

I have been taken back to the same bad place so many times by the same person.  Different stories, but all the same.  It has happened often enough that the title of this article was supposed to be "Quit Bitching or Quit Poker."

Perhaps that was too harsh, so I changed the title.  But you know what?  I find it to be true.

In The Poker Mindset, we are taught to "Understand and accept the realities of poker."

Once we accept certain realities, they become truisms.  Truisms are so obvious, they do not need mentioning.  If someone comes up to me and complains about "that goddamned sun setting every goddamned day," I would just assume he hates the rest of his life as well.

Accept the realities of the game  then set them aside.  Luck, variance, card-dead runs, bad reads, slow-rollers.  They do not merit mentioning anymore.  They just are, like trees in a forest. That is the landscape we are on.

The sun rises, the sun sets.  Aren't we already aware that we work around this reality with light bulbs?