Trying to win hands is my biggest leak

Ring a bell?


There's only two ways to win a poker hand. Everybody folds to you. Or you have the best hand at showdown. That's it. And we have no control over either thing. You can't make somebody fold who doesn't want to. And you can't make yourself have the best hand.

Trying to force something you can't control is dumb, and very frustrating. The problem is, if you grew up playing sports, you were taught, if you don't win, try harder. That's great for sports, where the fastest guy wins the race etc, but it's horrible for gambling. Trying harder to win a hand when it's not a good spot is spew.

Alot of times we bet because we hope he'll fold and it's our only chance to win. Or we call down hoping he's bluffing when really there's no chance. It's dumb. So why do we do it? We do it because we want to win the hand. Because winning hands is winning at poker, right? And we play this game to win. Well, trying to win hands is not how to win at poker. It's how to lose.

We should be looking for good spots. Can he call with a worse hand? Can he be bluffing here? Is he afraid of a bet here? That's all that matters, and it has nothing to do with trying to win hands, but it is how you win at poker.

The perfect example of all this is folding. No one likes to fold. Why not? If we have no real chance to win, we should be happy to fold. But we're not, because folding means losing the hand. We get confused about what we should be doing, looking for EV, and try to force the issue with some stupid move that really has no chance to work. Folding feels like losing, like quitting, which it would be in sports, but it's not in poker.

There's a big difference between trying to win hands and trying to play well, which is really winning.

I'm on a downswing simply because the cards aren't falling my way. It would be much, much worse if I tried to make things happen. That could turn an 8 buyin downswing in to a storm of tilt and a busted bankroll. In the last few thousand hands, I can count on both hands how many flops I've hit. And my flop cbet is ~25% (lately). There's just not much sense in betting when you get 2 fishy calling stations and the board constantly looks like crap. Don't get me wrong, I love fishy calling stations, but the cards just ain't falling my way as of late.

I like the sports reference. It's true. As poker players, we can take a lot of good things from team sports, like hard practice, film study, pushing our edges, etc. What happens in football (American) when a QB tries to make something happen that just isn't there? He gets picked off. Pick 6. Game over. Same goes for poker. When we force things, it's spew, and our bankroll laughs at us while it takes off down the road.

See: You Cannot Make Someone Fold

I think this whole subject can be defined withe one term variance. It's a critical part of poker and is one reason that bankroll management is necessary to be a winning player. When you have a million+ board combination's you have to realize one thing any two cards can win.
So my best advice is to keep playing your strong hands and let your other opponents do the calling with trash overall you will win the majority of pots based on your hand strength.

I like the Leakbuster app under holdem manager to help more properly adjust my cbetting and PFR HR to the most +EV decisions possible. I can also continuously check my progress of recent hand histories to see if recent changes to my game have helped or hurt my win rate overall.
The videos are well organized and they have multiple hand range guides based on table conditions which could clear up some misconceptions you have on when you should be betting/Raising/checking/calling/folding.

Sorry for the short post, but I really like the title of this thread. It gave me a lot to think about.