We’ve all been there. You’re approaching the bubble of a tournament. You’ve played well and battled hard. You’re dealt AA in the Big Blind and the super aggro chip leader jams from the Button. You snap it off and the Dollar signs start spinning in your eyes when you see they have J5o. The flop comes a beautiful A74. You start rubbing your hands together with glee. The turn is a 3. A slight twitch flickers in the corner of your eye. The river is a 6. You stand up and flip your desk over like it was nothing more than a Monopoly board at a family Christmas. “Why am I so unlucky!?”
Luck is an inevitable part of poker; there is no avoiding it. So why not learn to understand and embrace luck and the variance that it brings? One of the things that new or amateur poker players underestimate just how long you can be unlucky for. It often happens that players will bemoan their bad luck and declare themselves in a downswing because they haven’t cashed in 10 tournaments, when in fact this is perfectly normal in MTT’s. It’s not even uncommon in STT’s. It’s often said, “well you need to focus on the long game, variance will even out over time” What most people underestimate is just how long the long term can be. Take a generic 500 player MTT, paying 15% of the field and a good winning player with an average ROI of 30%. How many tournaments do you think you would need to play to guarantee making a profit? 10? 20? 50? 100? What if I told you the answer was close to 4,500? That’s right, even with a very strong 30% average ROI, it is possible to still be down after 4,400 tournaments. [Source: primedope.com tournament variance calculator]. Imagine how long it would take you to play 4,500 tournaments. If you played 10 tournaments a week, that would equate to more than 8 ½ years!
The important thing is to not wallow in these losses and focus on the negatives, because this will impact poorly on your game and therefore compound the losses. Focusing on the negatives can create a confirmation bias leading to a downward spiral of performance and results. Think about it; if you review your tournament histories looking for all the times you got unlucky, guess what you’re going to find? Yup, all those lousy bad beats and coolers.
Instead, why not try to focus on the positives and the times you got lucky? Getting lucky can often be more hidden than when you get unlucky. Partly because we tend to attribute good luck to us being skillful and partly because it doesn’t end up with us crashing out of the tournament as it often does when we get unlucky. So, what does getting lucky look like? Winning a flip, or cracking Aces with your Kings? What about all those times you hit the nut flush while your opponent had the K-high flush and you stacked them, or when you had top pair second kicker and the river brought a flushy/straighty card, causing the action to go check/check and saved you from losing another street of value to villains top pair top kicker. What about when you got it all in QQ against AK? Yes, Queens win more often than AK, but it doesn’t win 100% of the time, so when it does hold up, that’s lucky. Dare I say it, when you snap off villains J5o with your Aces and flop a set that’s lucky. And when that river card is a blank and those chips slide over to you as you pat yourself on the back and chuckle about how much of a donk your opponent is, you just got lucky.
Luck is everywhere in poker, all the time. Are you going to embrace it? Or are you going to blame it for your lack of progress?