Never Hide Your Poker Mistakes

Not hiding your mistakes and failures is a critical part of playing professional-level, winning poker. You are able to never overlook mistakes. You are able to never put aside losses. You are able to never hide from failure. You definitely must acknowledge, embrace and proclaim your disasters.

Losing players "forget" losing sessions, "ignore" bad plays that cost them money, and "overlook" the tilty, emotional play that is the foundation of their failure. They don't acknowledge losses, errors and problems because they are scared people will realize that they are bad players. Maybe their wife, maybe their friends, maybe other players will realize that this guy is full of baloney. But the main reason they ignore, hide and overlook is basically because THEY don't want to face the realization that they're the cause of their particular failure.

Basically, if they are losing players, then logically they should Stop Playing. But they do not want to avoid playing. They want to keep playing because they like to play. So rather than facing their inadequacy and getting better, they hide it and stay bad - or even worsen.

So your goal should always to be to downplay your successes - they are expected, after all - and to highlight your failures. Learn to focus on them without judgment or getting down on your self. Learn to get very interested in them, like a young boy with a fascinating bug. Poke it, flip it, pick it up and allow it crawl on your fingers. Put simply, examine it and ask it some questions.

Questions to ask your little red failure bug (mine is red):

- Where did you originate from, little failure bug?

- Why did I invite you in to my house?

- Are you part of my approved game, or did I change from what I consider to be optimal play?

- Are you really a failure, or are you merely bad luck within an interesting form?

- Did I play you to make myself feel a lot better?

- What other forms has this bug/mistake taken in my game?

Try to find variations of the same mistake in order to find a pattern.

Find out how much this type of mistake has run you in the past. Contemplate it; put a DOLLAR figure to it. Now, project into the future how much that mistake will cost you. If your goal is always to play twice more frequently at twice the stakes for the next decade, which mistake run you $100 last month, you'll be able to safely say that if you do not correct this mistake, you will be charged you $48, 000!!!

Now that little failure is not such a small thing, is it? If this is the one mistake that keeps you from being a winning player, then it might cost you thousands and Judi online thousands of dollars over your poker career - a career that will never exist.

Now, make a new rule - or revise a preexisting rule - to eliminate this mistake and drill it into your game. Utilize the rule writing formula. Write your new rule 100 times, put it in your journal, tape it to your screen.

The point here's to never ignore mistakes. They have been the Most Powerful tool you have for making money in poker. Make them known, talk about them with the others and let them out. When you keep these problems inside your self, they will fester and cause emotional constipation in your game.

You want to keep you poker mentality fresh and ventilated. The only path to do that is always to keep it transparent. Any parts that you hide will rot from insufficient oxygen and create dead areas in your poker psyche.

Remember any failure is a window by which you can see future, greater success. If you open it, explore it, and go through it you'll find new, sunny vistas. If you close the curtain on it and try to ignore, it will become a cold draft that annoys you forever and steals life from your own game.