A Time to Reflect in Poker

What Type of Player are You?

Sit down, pour yourself a beer and have a pleasant chat with the fellow in the mirror. But be careful, self-reflection is no simple psychological gimmick. There are levels to it and it isn't always going to lead to self-illumination. Clinical psychologists, particularly those trained in psychoanalysis, will tell you that in order to survive in this world, you need to develop defense mechanisms. The world is a pretty harsh place and most of us have personal styles that allow us to get along most of, but not all of the time. When things get a bit dicey, we need to find ways to defend ourselves from painful truths and anxiety-provoking realities.

Basically, there are two roads to travel down. The first, the easiest, the road most traveled, is the defensive one, the path of least resistance, the one where we stroll along and blithely dump our sins upon those about us. There are a bunch of characters who do it this way.

The Benighted: The game has a bunch of these guys. They're the ones whose visions of themselves are so far from reality that it scares you just to hear them tell it. These folks are the ones who think they are giving their psyches the once-over but, in fact, are simply engaging in self-delusion. They whine about bad luck, curse the dealers, belittle the "morons" who call their bluffs etc. etc. etc. If you bump into one of these characters, he will immediately flood you with "bad beat" stories.

The Self-Flagellator: We know these folks all too well. They are the ruminators, the ones who constantly beat themselves. They go home and mutter to themselves. about all the things that went wrong. Sometimes they view their fallen fortunes as self-inflicted wounds and beat themselves up for their poor play, sometimes they see their misfortune as some kind of insidious, karmic fate. Whenever anyone at the table hits a miracle river, you can hear them mutter, "When is my turn? When am I going to hit one of those? Why doesn't it ever happen to me?"

The Self-Defender: These are the ones who constantly defend their own play. Most of the players learned long ago to not even try talking to one of these people. They never lose because of any mistakes they might have made, and they never imagine that someone else at the table might play the game better than they do. Just the suggestion that they might have approached a hand from a different perspective will get you a face full of insults and challenges to your own sanity.

These self-defensive routines and others like them are fairly common, face-saving devices which help keep their practitioners psychologically stable. But if we want to improve, we are going to have to go beyond them. Defense mechanisms are two-faced.

There are effective because they protect us from painful truths. But they are ultimately deadly just because they protect us from painful truths. You may be able to fool yourself, but you will not fool your bankroll. If you want to really get better you need to become:

The Honest Self-Appraiser: This rare avis is the player who can acknowledge errors and seek to correct them, and, equally importanly, acknowledge good play and feel good about it. All winning players do this. They have to; otherwise they would not be winning players.