Carrying on from part one then and you end the session only to see it continue tomorrow and then…..snap! Something happens in your mind and you are no longer playing the same. I don’t mean that you are tilting, but those strategies that you had picked up from having read those books no longer seem to be working. You feel that your opponents may be running over you but you are not quite sure so you decide to deviate and play back.

You start to lose faith in the poker strategies that had been doing well initially and suddenly you are following your own methods. Because you have no real confidence in using these strategies and that they are still untested in your own mind then this makes matters worse.

This is what it all boils down to at the end of the day…confidence! Lack of confidence is a killer in poker because it can cause you to alter what you were doing. It can cause you to change successful methods for losing methods and when this happens then the end is not far away. This is precisely what I mean when I say that limit hold’em will mess with your head. In no other form of poker will you be forced at some stage to endure terrible bad runs and beat after beat even at the higher levels.

It is a common fact that top no limit players will experience a far greater percentage of winning sessions than top limit players. I see it all the time on forums, players experience what they see as a bad run and then come onto the forum looking for advice. They perhaps are losing after a few sessions of no limit or maybe after playing 20 SNG’s and are now looking for what to play next. They try Pot Limit Omaha or heads up play, in short, anything that will lead to success.

In a way I feel sorry for them because many of them will never ever get to where they are trying to be and that is to be winning poker players. But I suppose it is a good thing for the winners that we have such people otherwise without winners there would be no game as who would play a game that they couldn’t win at? But the thing is that with poker, everybody starts off by thinking that they can be successful at it.

There are no proven tests of a player’s ability other than winning and losing and most of the losing players hear about the winning players and want to be like them so they persevere. They buy more books, read more magazines, join coaching websites and all the rest of it. In their mind, not cracking poker is an indication of a lack of intelligence and if some eighteen year kid can do it who they have read about in some magazine then so can they! Look out for part three coming soon.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”

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