Following on from part one then…….you may say fine, that the guy should not have tilted and you would be correct! You may also say that he should not have switched to playing no limit Texas Hold em poker and you would also have been correct! You might have figured that playing heads up was another mistake and I would have to agree again. On top of that, any fool would see that $6000 at $50-$100 heads up no limit hold’em is a totally inadequate amount of money.

Plus, just what sort of player do you think is going to be sitting on that heads up table waiting for their opponent? You started off playing $20-$40 limit hold’em against a few students and recreational players and ended up playing heads up at $50-$100 no limit hold’em against one of the best players in the world who just happened to be a two time World Series of Poker bracelet winner and yes they are out there waiting for you online believe me!

But at the very core of this problem, we have to look at the reason why you tilted in the first place and it was not entirely to do with the fact that you lost was it? At the very heart of this problem is the fact that you dipped 150 big bets and could not understand how this could possibly have happened. The fact of the matter is that the experts and the mathematicians told you that you needed a 300 big bet bankroll and they did not say that for nothing now did they?

You need a bankroll for a reason and that reason is so that you can withstand the variance in the game. But it is because of this ignorance to what can actually happen to you and the range of just what can happen that leads players to tilting most of the time. The fluctuations in poker even for successful winning players can be brutal even at the best of times and in this way, a game like limit hold’em is not too dissimilar to a game like blackjack.

But stating that it is like blackjack with regards to the level of variance is hardly going to help a player if they do not understand just what the variance is like in blackjack either. But I played blackjack professionally for four years prior to playing poker and one of the best things to come out of that experience for me personally was that it really toughened me up mentally to be able to handle this very important and yet often over looked part of not just poker but gambling in general.

But it is this ignorance of “just how bad can bad get” that leads many players to either tilt their money away or pack the game in through fear of possibly losing all their money. Sooner or later, all good poker players will hit a really horrible bad run.

Mine happened after about six weeks but because I’d had six weeks of success then it made me far more resilient to handle a bad two week run. For new players, it is always better to hit that horrendous run after you have had a period of success because you have already built up your confidence that you can in fact make the game pay. Look out for part three of this series.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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