Ego-death

Clicking buttons for a living [Part 5/n]

Link to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4

One of the most different aspect of an athlete’s life is how every day starts from zero. When you are in a regular job, as there is no accurate way to determine your worth, employers will usually rely on past remuneration to assess your current value. So if you were making $100k annually in your last role, you won’t settle for anything less than $120k, even though you might be contributing far lesser in reality (work-life balance and all that jazz).

In sport, that is usually never the case. You scored a century in your last cricket game, you can still be bowled for a duck in the next one. You scored 12 goals in your last five football games, it’s still very much possible that you blank for the next five. You won your biggest poker last tournament last night, well, it may very well be your highest point at least for a few months.

Most poker players know this. Few appreciate what this actually means.

When I started studying poker deeply sometime last year, my win-rate didn’t shoot up, on the contrary, it became lower than when I had just started out. While some of it could be attributed to the competition also improving, it was still non-intuitive, because I was putting in a lot of work. After a lot of soul searching, analyzing my sessions and keeping track of my buyins/cashes, I came to the following conclusion – I was suffering from a fairly common yet devastating affliction, the curse of an overinflated ego.

This disease manifests itself in the following ways –

1. You become overly aggressive against ‘tight’ ranges – and then complain when your opponents show you the best hand. Your rationale is that you have been studying, putting in the work, so you have the right to 3-bet aggressively, play post-flop, and exploit opponents against nitty ranges. You complain to your poker buddies, so and so is such a nit, always has the nuts.
   
   One of the fundamental aspects about being a good poker player is the constant adjustment you have to make in your game. Playing against weaker/tighter players should theoretically be easier, but what tends to happen is that we inflate our egos and want to show the world our knowledge, when in reality we should be simply making small adjustments and gaining massive amounts of EV. Also appreciating everyone has their own style of play, their own strategy will help us develop a better counter-strategy instead of junking our opponents as nits/tight players.
   
2. Your results determine your ability to feel happy when your friends do well – This is something I have noticed extremely prevalent in the Indian poker circuit, and I’d be the first to admit that I have gone through something similar. When I used to be on downswings, I just could not get myself to feel happy for another player’s success. Oh so you won the Global Millions for $80K, congrats but here I am stuck on a $15K downswing. This was puzzling because I really like my friends, sure they are competitors at some level but I did wish them well.
   
   Eventually I realized this was happening because of the same reason – ego. As someone who feels they are working hard, is intelligent and somewhat competitive, I had started to feel that I am ‘owed success’. I won’t say that I am a monk now and downswings don’t bother me, but understanding that the world owes me nothing, that results do not linearly follow effort in poker (and in most pursuits) has at least given me the ability to feel genuinely happy for my friends’ success.
   
3. Your buyin behaviour reflects your ego – Sometime last year I fired 7 bullets in a $350 tournament on an Indian site, when my bankroll would not recommend firing more than two. Looking back, this was also an outcome of a big ego, where you feel you deserve to be playing in the deep stages of an Indian high-roller tournament. Turns out there is no such thing as deserving to play anywhere, there are only decisions to be made, and any decision not being firmly grounded in EV will impact win-rate.
   
   As Bencb recently said, it’s not enough to be good at playing poker, but very important to also be a good poker player. One of the main aspects of being the latter is killing your ego. These days when I feel I am going a bit out of line, whether it’s in my game, my buyin behavior or even my general outlook towards life, I take a moment and try to answer the question – is this mehro2511 or is this his ego?