Temper Your Expectations

"I've never known a man worth his salt who in the long run, deep down in his heart, didn't appreciate the grind, the discipline. There is something good in men that really yearns for discipline." - Vince Lombardi

I often wonder why people play poker. Many would say that, at its core, the game is played to fulfill some sort of competitive void. A void that, in many of us who are former high school athletes, and while good, were not great enough to play at the collegiate or professional level. Others would say that poker is a game played to appease one's ego. The thrill that is achieved by outfoxing your opponent has few rivals. Yet others will argue that poker is played primarily for the gamble. Gamblers get sucked into the game for its ability to provide them with that knot in their stomach that cannot be obtained without having some sort of trigger; that trigger being poker's ability to win or lose it all on any given hand. I would say that poker is all of these rolled up into one, but the main reason I play is to make money consistently.

When you play poker, with your primary objective for playing being to make money, you have to learn to accept certain variables. These variables are often uncontrollable, yet may have a significant impact on your emotional state of mind. Without being able to accept these, you will not be able to develop a winning game for the long term. When you get to the point at which you can accept all of the luck, variance, and cold streaks that come with playing poker, you must then temper your expectations before reaching an expert status level.

By tempering your expectations, I am referring to your monetary expectations. I often read posts on PocketFives.com about how people are showing an ROI (return on investment) in the 40 percent and 50 percent range for their sit-and-gos. While these numbers are excellent for the short term, they are unrealistic to maintain over the long term. By training your mind to become immune to short-term results, you will ultimately achieve your long-term goals. It is when you let your mind be affected by the short-term goals that your long-term goals suffer. This column discusses mainly sit-and-gos but you can apply my point to all of poker.

Online poker without multitabling (playing several games simultaneously) is comparative to owning a Porsche 911 and never taking it out of first gear. The ability to multitable is what makes online poker such a profitable venture. If you are not using this to your advantage, please start to do so immediately. Taking this knowledge into account will better help you to temper your expectations. When playing a sit-and-go and playing for the long term, you need to have an estimate as to what your hourly profit rate is going to be. You can figure this out by tracking your results, buy-ins, and profits to come up with an ROI percentage, but what can you expect to profit per each sit-and-go for the long-term?

A regular poster on another forum, who posts under the name Irieguy, did a study in which he took 30 SNG (sit-and-go) players who had a history of winning SNG play and recorded their results over almost a two-month period. Here are the results:

Upon reviewing the statistics, you can better gauge what you should expect to win with each SNG you enter. While some 26,000 is still a relatively small sample, it is enough for the purposes of this column. It is not about what type of December you had, or what results for October that you wish to achieve. In the end, it truly is about quantity if you wish to consistently make money playing poker. Simply put, the more SNGs that you play, the more money you will consistently make.

To summarize, if your primary objective for playing poker is to make money, then you need to increase the volume of your play. You need to learn how to play four tables or more at a time. You need to be able to withstand a month or longer of what I call DSV (downside variance) and you must not let this affect your play. Most important, you need to avoid playing results-oriented poker. The end result relies not on a particular play you made in a single SNG, but how many SNGs you were able to competitively complete in a given year. Once you have a leak-free - or close to leak-free - game and you can have your ROI around 15 percent to 20 percent for the long term, then consistently making money becomes nothing more than maintaining "the grind and the discipline."