When Poker Results are Everything

hey what's up everyone chris here for ones.com when results are everything let's go through this a little bit in steps when you're in a session for example are you already counting all your ridges how much are you up or down do you know exactly how much or do you have a good idea of how much it is how long is your losing streak has it been a week is it three days five thousand hands seventeen thousand hands are you making any calculations about anything what are you calculating how much more do you need to play

until until you can move up in stakes how much more do you need to play until you back to break even how about caring about how others see you how you appear to others do you want to look like you are really knowledgeable really good really strong player that has a great work ethic and in truth you're not executing on these things so you're trying to like mask it by saying certain things or maybe putting others down or about yourself you are perhaps only showing people when things are going good never bad or the opposite

you're only showing things when they're going bad but never really when they're okay or when they're good or when they're normal it all matters on your perspective of course so let's look at what happens before a session are you maybe afraid or super excited about getting to the tables either of these can be quite dangerous to you to your career and we'll get to that in a little bit are you perhaps experiencing terrors having to play or are you afraid you might lose again and therefore you're not even starting any tables or now all of

a sudden you only play for very very short periods which can be good but you're also training yourself to be nourishing that fear are you unsure about your strategy or other choices because of a certain losing streak or maybe even you're winning and you think you're not as good as you think you are and therefore you think you need to work harder you need to become better and now you play without trusting in anything that you do and therefore sometimes you will lose the ability to think straight and make good decisions so let's look at

having some reason behind all of this when you see these guys these two doctors carrying an injured man perhaps to an ambulance or to the hospital do you want them to think about their paycheck when you have an emergency do you want them to only focus on their money their outcome when what matters is to you your life is on the line probably not right what about her do you want her to focus on something other than you in traffic so that she doesn't take a picture of you speeding and give you a speeding ticket

of course you want her to focus on something else you want her to be distracted you want her to perhaps forget to turn on the camera that takes these pictures so as you can see with her you want her to focus on something else because your outcome would be negative if you're getting a speeding ticket with the doctors you want them to focus on you and on you only because your life is on the line what about this situation a biohazard situation would you act careless in a potential biohazard situation where you could die due

to some toxic exposure no you wouldn't you would be extremely careful what about this guy if you're ever seated on a rocket which is obviously not gonna happen or like yeah doesn't make any sense but just think about the idea if you were seated on such a rocket would you be waving and smiling to everybody or would you hold on to dear life to not fall off yeah well you would probably hold on to your dear life instead of waving and smiling and being super happy and all that so what is this all showing us

it's showing us that where our focus has to be comes from our idea of goals for example if you want to stay alive in a biohazard situation you will be very careful if you want to stay alive when you are in an emergency situation you want the other people to be very very highly focused if you want to be without a speeding ticket you want the person to be very distracted so you don't want people to work well to focus well when the outcome would be against you and you want them to focus really really

well when the outcome is for you or for yourself you want to focus really well if your life is on the line and there's no really not really a reason for you to not focus well on anything because you don't want to practice and train and get good at not focusing right so at a poker table if you see someone playing either live or online and they're key they keep on chatting and uh complaining about results or things like that they are clearly not very very focused so there's a good chance that they will be

making some mistakes do you want to be that person or when you talk to other people while you're not playing when you are focused only on results you not only get good at thinking about results more often but literally at the table your focus will be all on that so you won't be playing your best game you won't be getting the result that you desire oftentimes because you're focused on something completely different and as we saw here you only want someone or yourself to focus on something else when the outcome is against you so like

for yourself in this case if you want your outcome to be absolutely terrible and you want to lose all your money well focus on something else but playing perhaps focus on results because results focus while playing doesn't focus on strategy so all of a sudden what's going on is you are not focused on what actually gives you the results that you want it's a little bit of a paradox but it's quite important to learn to focus on the strategy focus on the process instead of the results so what is at the root of all this

let's look at what makes all these things happen it's fears desires judgments something's good or something's bad thinking you know things thinking you understand when you really only see a small glimpse of what's going on projections like projecting into the future oh if i keep on winning at 6 pb per 108 bb per 100 i'll be exactly there at this point in time well you don't know that even if you are that type of winner the way it will play out might show very very different sure the mathematics are correct but the way it plays

out is not linear so for example if you have a win rate of 6 bb per 100 add 100 000 hands you might be at a certain point but there's a good chance and you can do the you can use a variance calculator you might be at a completely different point even though you are a true winner of that rate so what are fears and desires in this case it's you wanting to hold on to something what is that something that you want to hold on to it could be something that you perceive as important

in in case of uh results it might be money it might be that you think it's very important for my status in life to have a certain amount of money but if that were so why are there so many rich people that are depressed so maybe it's not all that it's something else it's something inside of you but if you hold on to any idea that you have very dearly it can very quickly show you that you are either close-minded or that you will be stuck because reality plays out in a slightly different way so

wanting to hold on to something means you hold on to a specific idea that you think is actually true but how do you know it's true what proof do you have is it because someone said something once or you've seen like 20 people have a certain result well these 20 people could have gotten very lucky or they could have gotten very lucky plus they worked really hard on something there's so many different potential reasons why you see those people learn to think for yourself learn to look at everything and be precise and detail-oriented look at

why you are holding on to something why do you think this is so true versus something else not being true oftentimes people also want to avoid pain they want to avoid the potential pain it's not even the pain itself because usually people can handle quite a lot of pain they want to avoid the potential pain that they think they might experience if this or that happens and when that happens oh i will feel like this and i don't want that and they will go through immense length to avoid that pain even if it's not even

clear or certain which brings us to the next point wanting certainty and with that one it's kind of funny uh think about that for a moment in terms of poker you want certainty in poker in a game that literally has uncertainty built in only thing that you can learn with certainty is that it's uncertain what the turn card will be or what the flop will be what the river will be sure there's a probability there and you can learn to calculate these probabilities but you will be calculating a lot instead focus on the strategy focus

on the ranges focus on the potential ranges that you can perceive for example if someone is a very tight player you would give them a different range than if someone just plays 100 of their hands and always open raises and three bets 100 of the hands now all of a sudden the whole game tree has changed and you play very differently so in that sense again we're at a paradox um in that sense yes you have some certainty but the certainty is not about how often you will win exactly in each session and each week

in each month the certainty is about the fact that the probabilities have changed and that you can understand a little bit what that means oftentimes people also dream of the big shot dreaming that they can achieve this or that today or tomorrow and it makes them play higher and once they actually win a little bit when quote unquote they weren't supposed to win because they were they're not yet on that stage stage in that stake or whatever then all of a sudden uh they start become [Music] they start to become very fearful and don't want

to play in that game anymore or won't don't want to play their own game anymore even because they're afraid of losing their money back because deep down they think they don't deserve it well whether you deserve it or not doesn't really matter it matters in the sense that yeah if you don't deserve it meaning you actually got lucky and you really don't have the skill it would be wise to not play that high so what matters is not whether you deserve it or not but whether you have the skill to execute at the table at

all times instead of only focusing oh i want so much now i'm good or oh i want so much i'm probably just lucky and i'm not good enough therefore i won't play that much if you're a professional your job is to play and you have to understand that your job is to play judgment another thing as i said before this is good this is bad that's the judgment and what is good what is bad what does that even mean what good and bad mean is that from your perspective from where you stand right now in

your opinion with all the factors that you are able to see this is a good thing or this is a bad thing but unless you are the very best in the world by far by far and you really know everything about the game well it's getting very difficult to distinguish between good and bad what is really good what is really bad and does it even matter no it doesn't what matters is how you saw something and whether there's more to see or not and then adjusting your view based on that so instead of saying oh

this is good it's bad or this is right and this is wrong you could say this is slightly more right based on how i see things or this is slightly more correct and therefore it fits a little bit better with my goals or with what i want but what i want i don't even know really whether that is true so for now i will just go with a model of here's how i see things i understand this and for now this is how i think this is right but i'm very open and here's the key

really you have to always be open-minded be open to be corrected how can anything ever offend you you can only be offended if you think about that if you hold on to something as we were saying earlier if you hold on to a specific view and you think someone else either you respect the person or you don't respect the person at all doesn't uh either or but it doesn't really matter that much um that person is saying something against what you believe in and therefore now you're like oh no this is this is wrong i

know better now you think you're better than they are and now you think you're not you don't have anything to learn from them anymore so uh yeah it goes into infinity really into every direction if you think something and you hold on to that thought you hold on to that idea that something is good or something is bad that you are better than someone else then you will miss oftentimes what you could have learned and what that leads to quite often is quick conclusions think about your life where have you made quick conclusions where have

you just taken in like one or two bits of information and made a quick decision sometimes that is good quote unquote good sometimes that is very useful and very important to do because you have to act quickly but usually it's better to gather a little bit more information and wait before you act to see if you got everything right it all obviously also depends on your situation on the situation in your life but if you act too quickly let's say for example you have a fight with a loved one and you say something you shouldn't

have said well you acted too quickly you came to a quick conclusion the first thing that sprung into your mind you said instead of waiting a little bit and not jumping to a conclusion quickly maybe that person said this specific thing for reason that i don't see right now that i don't yet see and very important in this case also is that oftentimes these things spring from a short term view so having a short term view only means you only look at a hand sample of say 1 000 hands if you're a live player maybe

three days maybe you look at it for a week oh i've been running bad for a week or two weeks or i've been running bad for the last ten thousand hands ten thousand hands is something but it's still very short term it doesn't really tell a big story or a story at all you can perhaps make some conclusions whether you're playing correctly or not and you can look at your statistics and everything but if you adjust all the time too quickly you also not have a real game plan going on for yourself and therefore your

execution at the tables will always be very wonky and shaky instead of sticking with something to a certain degree and adjusting it when you see it's clearly not the way to go for you or when it seems to make sense to make the change so here again the paradox holding on and not holding on to something you want to be aware of not changing too quickly but also not holding on too long and it's a fine line is something that you want to learn how to do make these judgments not as like absolute judgments of

this is good this is bad but rather like i said this could be good this could be bad this could be useful for me or i think i'm doing things pretty okay right now but i'm definitely open to be corrected and if the results show me that i'm wrong i will adjust my game or if someone gives you advice and you feel offended now you're not even listening to their advice anymore or you're listening to what their advice might point to even if the advice is not totally correct it might still point you in a

direction that you needed to see or hear but if you think you're offended now you're not even looking at the data anymore you're only looking at the fact that you feel offended then the other thing is a lack of knowledge and or foresight so when you don't understand what you're doing it's very difficult to to understand what is good or bad what is right or wrong and so on and therefore for you to be able to conclude certain things at all even to a small degree you need knowledge you need to build a knowledge base

but at what point do you have enough i know of a lot of players that place for example low stakes that think once they understand like the idea that rangers play against rangers and you should think in that way and so on um that all of a sudden they think they found the holy grail but they don't know yet how to exactly execute it and when to step away from it and so on so only because the fact that you have knowledge doesn't mean that you have complete knowledge and trusting too deeply in your knowledge

to be so right and holding on to that idea you will oftentimes miss what's right in front of you what could have easily been seen and what others see and might even point out to you and you're like no no i see it better i know more than you do and therefore i will not adjust this or that and also if we think about foresight oftentimes foresight goes hand in hand with knowledge because you think you know something and you like the foresight hey um for example in a good run you think you can't be

beaten and your strategy is perfect you found the missing link in the poker game and now you know everything but you lack the foresight of variance coming in and hitting you hard and now all of a sudden you're crushed so if you think you know something too deeply you lack the foresight of simply understanding that you don't know you don't know anything but now let's look at philosophy for a sec in verse 73 it says the tao is always at ease it overcomes without competing so what this talks about is first of all think of

yourself here always be at ease how would you play if you were never rattled if you were relatively calm all the time and or able to come back from a really emotional downswing much more quickly how would you play how would you be able to play volume for example instead of missing three four five days two weeks of playing you would come back sit at the table and be a little bit shaken maybe still but already like kind of recovered and therefore you'd be able to play much more volume at a pretty high level compared

to what you usually would do it overcomes without competing what this shows us is if you just keep on showing up if you keep on moving forward and sitting down and playing obviously you shouldn't play when you're like completely untilt and crazy and by crazy i mean like on monkey tilt um then you should definitely take some time off and work it out because the dow doesn't need to take that time out right it's always at ease by the way another way of looking at this and that's also a useful tool is to always look

at the words itself so is always at ease is is a form of stillness it's something that is it's not moving always is also a form of stillness at ease is a form of stillness and then in the next one it says it overcomes without competing that's a form of movement it moves it moves but it doesn't try to overcome anything but it overcomes anything by not trying because it just keeps on moving meaning in your case you keep showing up to the games and you keep on playing and you keep on playing without being

on tilt now all of a sudden you are just like you know like when a bot plays in a game they can play 24 7 and they always play a game their a game whatever that means and therefore they are superior to humans because they can show up all the time they just get the volume in at their highest level all the time it answers without speaking a word because when you speak words when you start to define it when you start judging it now you are going into a place where it becomes difficult to

mention everything and to be precise enough and you enter a world of where you sometimes will try to show that you know something either to others or to yourself and you will say it and say it and say it and all of a sudden it hammers into your brain and you start believing what you're saying or maybe you believed what you were saying in the first place and you were holding on to a specific thought and that thought is hindering you that thought for example being results because that's the video right when results are everything

so when results are everything and all things that you ever think about as soon as you start talking about it all the time you're hammering it in but instead if you don't talk about it as much if you don't use words if people and ask you a question about these things like uh how did you do instead of saying yeah i did i won x amount i won that amount i lost this amount or whatever you can either not speak about that at all or you can learn to talk about it like yeah you know

i played pretty well i started off pretty weak but then i found myself and i played really well i focused on everything and so on that's much more useful because not only are you going to potentially get some feedback on how you look at things but you're talking about and you're training yourself and looking at the right things the things that actually will yield the results that you want instead of just focusing on the results because as we saw if the policewoman doesn't focus on you doesn't focus on the camera being on you might not

get the speeding ticket or if the doctors don't focus on you well you might die it arrives without being summoned also a little bit let's let's look at arriving here if you keep on moving you will arrive regardless wherever you want to go if you keep on moving the direction sometimes might change the path might sometimes change when you were a low stakes grinder when you became a mistakes grinder when you became a high stakes grinder they were all different approaches but these approaches built upon one another you had to learn certain things so that

you could later unlearn them and that's why sometimes it's so useful to have a coach around because they can teach you more quickly to unlearn certain things it accomplishes without a plan here in today's world everybody always wants to make a plan and have a very specific goal and so on and that is very useful in many places but sometimes it also makes you too narrow-minded to focus on just this one little thing and when the one little thing that you focus on is unfortunately something that is not beneficial for you well now you're in

trouble now you're doing something that is kind of moving in the wrong direction however the dao for example in this case accomplishes without a plan why well because it's always still is always at ease and it always keeps on moving it shows up it's place it plays it plays therefore sure maybe there's a shorter way but really there isn't there's a shorter way maybe for one person but not for another so these things also change from person to person and if you make a specific plan based on how someone else did it for example if

you're lucky and you function exactly the same way as that person and you find the same situations as that person you're the same you have the same amount of luck and so on then yeah okay sure maybe your plan will work but for most people really just showing up all the time being at ease looking at everything in a detailed manner and executing what you know and then trying to learn more about the things that you don't know and accepting that there are things that you don't know now you can accomplish and you don't even

need a plan maybe you want a plan and that's okay but be aware that having a plan is more to have a direction that you want to go in instead of being 100 precise with that plan because there's always something showing up in life where you did not expect that you could not calculate that into your plan and therefore it might throw everything that you had planned out the window now let's look at we oftentimes have a lot of expectations on how we think things should be how we think things work and that goes back

into knowing or thinking that we know something so let's look at this little graphic where the green line represents how you subconsciously expect your poker career or this month or any period of time to kind of go especially if you've been running hot or if you've been a good winner for a while but the blue line represents how it's actually going so you might still end up at a similar point but the way you get there is very different from how you expected it to be so you have to realize that things in life and

in poker are not linear they're not going in a straight line rarely are but if you look and zoom out far enough which we will do a little bit later if we zoom out far enough we'll see that it almost looks like a straight line actually it's just the short term that doesn't look like that and the short term is very difficult to define in poker it's a little easier because you can say it could be ten thousand hands it could be fifty thousand hands even a hundred thousand hands but at some point like two

hundred thousand hands or five years of playing 10 years of playing it becomes a little bit more long-term and you can start to see the tendencies show up more often depending on how you show up at work basically so now thinking you know and making projections and what these things mean making projections is you looking into the future and many people do that either consciously or subconsciously they're like oh i'm up this much i'm down this much i need to win back so i can finally quit my session or the decisions that you make and

the actions you take are for a very specific reason because for example you've been down all day or all week now you were starting to slowly win a little bit now you want to quit immediately because i need to win and i need to book a win and i'm never winning anymore so it's important for me to have that yes of course if it's important for you that literally means it's important for you but is it important for the game is it important for your career yeah to some degree it is to another degree oftentimes

these things are blown out of proportion a little bit and you have to become aware of the fact that you are making a small thing or a relatively short-term thing into too big a thing that's why we're saying earlier the dow is always at ease if you are always at ease and if you overcome without competing if you continue moving if you show up at the tables and you play and you learn how to focus on strategy and not so much on results now all of a sudden the results will show up for you instead

of you trying to look for them they'll be there clearly clear as the light of day but sometimes of course a downswing can last longer than we wish or that they just rattle us because they're a little too long right so when they're a little too long and they become difficult to handle it's very good to take some time away but the time away is not because all of your game is terrible i mean if your game is bad yeah then you should take time away from the game and study or play lower maybe uh

to train the things that you study but overall the time away is to unravel you relax yourself get yourself to be back at ease so that over time you can show up again because it's about showing up it's a bit it's a game of large numbers next thing is thinking of only one outcome when you only see one outcome ahead of you either be the win or a loss doesn't really matter here if you only look at one thing you'll miss all the other things that are showing up right around you for example if all

you think about is playing at this particular table with all these incredible players you might miss out on a once in a lifetime opportunity where there's a table with really like two really really weak players that you can make a lot of money on but obviously most not obviously but most people these days are pretty good at table selecting so you'll already look for that but if you only look for that you might miss out on some other opportunity you might miss out and fear of missing out is not a good thing i'm not saying

that i'm just saying if you only think of one thing you might not have enough information or data available to you to make the right decision so if you only think that he has aces in this particular point in in this particular spot or he only has a flush or he only has a straight and he only has like three combos of a straight or something then now all of a sudden you are missing the point of how many bluffs that person has because you've been beat 10 times in a row now and this particular

spot just triggers you to think oh of course he only has this and then you make a decision you click a button or you make a fold you make a call or whatever that is not and well informed it is based out of a fear or out of thinking only about one thing instead of looking at the whole situation it's like i said it's not about missing out on anything in terms of uh if you don't do this then you miss out on it on the greatest opportunity or anything no it's about missing out on

the information that is right in front of you that can easily be seen if you weren't so emotionally conflicted or engaged or if you weren't making all these projections into the future if you think about oh i need to win another um 30 bb for my day to be break even and now the pot goes a little bit over it now you're thinking only if you're 30 bp and you might not think of the range completely anymore in in the way that it is required to think about so it's the same thing as zooming in

on just one thing which shows a lack of knowledge if you zoom in on one specific thing sometimes that can be useful like if you have a very specific goal if you have a very specific idea of where you want to go in certain situations that can be very useful but if you fail to zoom out which most people do now you're in trouble now you're putting yourself into a situation where you don't gather enough information to make informed decisions anymore because you're making calculations but you're missing the important variables to make these calculations correct

or sometimes you might not even know the correct variables therefore making the calculations that you are making is either not worth doing it because how would you calculate an equation when you don't know the variables you can't therefore when you do make the calculation in that situation you are actually making a calculation about something that has nothing to do with the actual situation in front of you and therefore it's probably even more dangerous to do that so don't try to be too smart don't try to be too knowledgeable something that i hear often times is

uh with this win rate i can achieve x if i play y hands so like let's say you have 6bp per 100 so over 300k hands you win this amount or that amount and then you calculate it out and uh we will look at a an example a little bit later but you can think about all these things or you cannot think about them depending on who you are and what you think about but ultimately if you make these calculations they oftentimes turn out a lot different from what you would expect because oftentimes like we

said before there's only like a short-term view in play here so you don't look at your whole career all the time you don't like look at your 10 years of work that you've done or 10 years of work that you're going to be doing instead you're thinking about the 10 years but the only thing yet that you see is the 5 000 hands or the last 50 000 hands that you just played instead of 10 years and those influence your thinking and your emotions your psychological and emotional well-being quite a lot because you're not zooming

out you're not looking at it from a much larger perspective and if you do make these situations if you do make these calculations oftentimes it is you calculated like oh if i play y amount of hands like if i play five million hands at six people hundred then in x amount of month or in the z amount of month i'll be reaching my goal well maybe maybe not who knows variance will probably play a trick on you and not just poker variants the variance in your life something might happen good or bad you might become

a father you might become a mother you might meet the person of your life you might switch careers there are so many different variables that are very difficult to calculate or to consider ahead of time so making these calculations is not very useful it's only useful if you do it once to see to get a rough estimate of what certain things might be like but then you should probably also use a poker variance calculator to see what that could look like also in different outcomes even if you're a 6bb winner alright guys that's it for

today i will make this video a multi-part series and also in general make more videos about results-oriented thinking and if you like the video please give it a like if you have any questions or suggestions please let me know down in the comments and i will talk to you in the next one take care [Music] you