2. Commit yourself to making the necessary changes.
Learning these comparisons is just the first step. If you don’t commit yourself to changing toward the winners’ patterns, this book will waste your time and money. If you can’t or won’t make that commitment, you’ll continue to get the same, disappointing results. It really is that brutally simple.
2. Winners Are More Motivated and Disciplined
To win at poker, one must want to win. More importantly, one’s subconscious mind must want to win! . . . The poker player who can’t control his mental and emotional state will never be a winner, and it doesn’t matter how much experience, natural talent, money, or knowledge he possesses.
—Jason Misa6
Winners have both an intense desire to win and extreme self-control. Like the “rational man” of classical economic theory, they do whatever it takes to maximize their long-term profits.
They work harder, study longer, remain more alert, act more deceptively, avoid games they can’t beat, attack more ruthlessly, criticize themselves more harshly, refuse to yield to their emotions, and always insist on having an edge. They make these and many other sacrifices that most people won’t make. In fact, they are so competitive that they may feel that they’re not sacrificing anything important. Everything but winning is hardly worth thinking about.
You may think that it is unhealthy to compete so compulsively. I agree and have argued forcefully that—from a mental health perspective—you should be more balanced.7
But this book concerns only winning, and everything you feel, think, or do that conflicts with that goal will reduce your profits. You must decide how important winning is to you and how high a price you will pay for it. Some people naively assume that they can win without making sacrifices. They will certainly be disappointed.
What’s the bottom line? Unless you have both an intense desire and extreme self-control, you probably won’t do all it takes to become a big winner.
An Intense, Ruthless Need to Win
That drive is the starting point. Without it you won’t be willing to make all those sacrifices. The best poker players are like Larry Bird, a member of basketball’s Hall of Fame. Red Auerbach, his coach, once said, “Larry doesn’t come to play. He comes to win.”
Poker winner’s competitiveness is almost unrelated to what the money will buy. They need to win, not so that they can buy more toys, but because they define themselves by how much they win.
They are also more ruthless than intense competitors in most games because poker is a negative-sum game. Business, the stock market, real estate, and many other “games,” are partly win-win, but poker is purely win-lose. Your profits always come at someone else’s expense.
Poker is much tougher than most win-lose games because they are zero-sum, but—because of the house’s charges—the winners’ profits are always less than the loser’s losses. Unless you ruthlessly seek and exploit edges, those charges will eat you up.
Poker is also a predatory game. All successful predators follow a simple rule: attack the weakest, most vulnerable prey. You make most of your money, not by outsmarting the better players, but by exploiting the weaker ones. It’s the exact opposite of the values you have been taught: Be honest. Fight fair. Pick on somebody your own size. Be gentle toward the weak.
His ruthlessness helped Jack Straus to become a Poker Hall of Famer. He once said, “I’d bust my own grandmother if she played poker with me.” Countless poker players agree, and their ruthlessness gives them a huge edge. “If you are not driven to win and play against equally talented, but much more ruthless competitors, you are going to lose.”8
Losers lack the winners’ single-mindedness. They want to satisfy many needs, but these needs conflict with each other. Focusing solely on profits may not feel right, and it’s not as much fun. They want to challenge tough games and players; they feel guilty about being deceitful; they ache to criticize fools who make terrible mistakes and give them bad beats; and they don’t want to beat up weak relatives and friends. They try to satisfy all their motives by doing a bit of this and a little of that, which prevents them from winning as much as more single-minded competitors.
Some winners don’t believe that their attitude is abnormal. They feel contempt for people who don’t put winning above everything, and they certainly can’t understand them. For “normal” people (aka “losers”) poker is just a game. They play it for many reasons, but primarily for pleasure. Of course, they like to win, but they can enjoy poker even when they lose. In many games some losers are having a good time and some winners are miserable (because they aren’t winning enough to satisfy their insatiable needs).
Insatiable needs are a sign of psychological problems and a source of constant dissatisfaction, but all I’m discussing now is profitability. If you want to maximize it, you have to put the bottom line ahead of everything.
Extreme Discipline
This quality is as important as the drive to win. Without that drive you won’t be willing to make the sacrifices, but without extreme self-control, you won’t be able to make them. Winners are extremely disciplined.
Barry Greenstein, a great player, certainly agrees. His book, Ace on the River, contains a list of the twenty-five traits of winning players. “In control of their emotions” was fourth, and his list included several other self-control qualities:
• Persistent was sixteenth.
• Able to think under pressure was eighth.
• Honest with themselves was second.
• Psychologically tough was first. The best don’t give in, no matter how severe the psychological beating.”9
Winners’ discipline affects every element of their game. They fold hands they want to play. They resist their desires to challenge tough players. They push aside their pity for vulnerable players and mercilessly attack them. They force themselves to concentrate. They resist the impulse to criticize bad players. They objectively assess their own play and get feedback from coaches and friends. They have the discipline to do the unpleasant things that losers won’t do.
The Need for Balance
Without enough self-control, an obsessive need to win can destroy you. You would be like an extremely powerful racing car with a broken steering system. I call these uncontrolled people “supercompetitors.” They have two major weaknesses:
1. They can’t accept their own limitations.
2. They always need to win, even when the issues are trivial.
Both problems are caused by denying reality about themselves and poker. Winners accept their limitations and recognize that they can’t always win. They make intelligent trade-offs, sacrificing some satisfactions and accepting unimportant defeats to do the only thing that really matters, getting the chips.
Supercompetitors look macho, but they are really so insecure that they have to prove something. They pay a high price for their insecurity. Some very talented supercompetitors severely harm themselves by:
1. Playing above their bankrolls.
2. Choosing games that are too tough for them.
3. Challenging the toughest players in those games.
4. Overreacting to bad beats and other losses.
5. Continuing to play, trying desperately to get even, because they can’t accept a losing session.
6. Criticizing weak players and arguing about trivial issues.
Supercompetitors generally deny the truth about themselves. Instead of admitting that they are insecure, they rationalize