@Excaliburns has been stressing the importance of having a “winning mindset” and it’s something I’ve been trying to take to heart.
What does that even mean? How can I turn the goal of having a winning mindset into actionable changes in my decision-making at the table?
I sure don’t know all the answers, but I think I’ve found one: not giving myself permission to lose.
One of my strengths at the table is that I’m not afraid of losing. If I think a play is good, I’ll go for it, even if getting called or missing my draw might mean busting early. But sometimes, I take this too far. In particular, when I’ve suffered a bad beat or just run into a better hand and ended up suddenly staring down a very short stack, I have a bad habit of mentally shrugging and saying “well, guess I lost.” I’ll go all-in on the next remotely playable hand or force the action in a spot where conditions don’t really make the play favorable, and when I predictably go broke, I’ll tell myself “well, you were super short anyway and had little chance of winning. Sometimes, it’s just not your day.”
This is my first time participating in RPOS, and I was bummed to get off to a truly awful start. I was losing, losing, losing, despite building a decent stack in the later stages once or twice. Because I wanted so badly to win a qualifying tournament and be eligible for the Tournament of Champions, I made a conscious effort to improve my focus for the following day’s events. I stopped multi-tabling so much in order to be more present in the game. I modified my strategy somewhat, taking a little less voluntary risk, bluffing less, and relying more on simply making stronger hands than my opponents.
But I think the most important change was that I stopped giving myself permission to lose when something went wrong.
I ended up winning 2 RPOS events and placing 3rd in the High-Roller Main Event. In ALL THREE of those tournaments, there was a point where things went wrong and I sat with a very short stack (sometimes no more than 1-2bb) with the field down to the last two tables. During the Main Event, I came back twice from being all-in for 1bb, and then despite still being quite short on chips made crucial, fairly conservative preflop folds with 55, 22, and A9 (in each case, I would have lost).
It would have been at least marginally fine, from a GTO perspective, to call and bust in any of those spots. But I had finally found my winning mindset—I sensed that my range was not far enough ahead of my opponents’, I thought I could find better spots later on, and most importantly I did not give myself permission to lose. This allowed me to find the optimal decisions more often than before.
Poker is so hard that we can’t afford to make it harder by beating ourselves. If we want to be as successful as possible, we need to keep a winning mindset and not give ourselves an easy out!
I think if I could play at this level all the time, I’d increase my overall in-the-money rate by at least 5%. Especially in tournaments, you’re never really finished until you lose your last chip, so no matter what happens, you need to find the courage and the discipline to keep playing your best—recognizing this can make all the difference.
How many of your wins have come after being 1 card away from the felt? How many of those wins would have been just another hard luck story if you’d mentally conceded before crossing the finish line?