There is an ebb and flow in playing poker which has to be mastered for the player to be able to finish fast enough and yet end slowly enough to allow them to win. Poker consists of a series of these flows, it goes back and forth, dips and dives and in some aspects uses up tremendous spurts of energy. There are rare moments in poker where goals are reached, but the ultimate aim is to win the battle still standing, particularly in terms of tournament play.
It requires a lot of stamina to go up and down with these ebbs and flows and all the way through a tournament the player enjoys many defeats as well as victories, but this is all part of the ebb and flow of playing this game. These happen when you make a bad choice on what could potentially be a good hand in a fold, or if you bluff to win a nice little pot.
Altogether these individual losses and goals make up what the poker game stands for in total; a series of good and bad events which should lead you to winning in the end. Essentially however, what matters is not the little battles lost or won, but what happens as a result of the total battle.
A single poker tournament can be like the entire career of a poker player. If Chris Moneymaker had not won the 2003 WSOP final event by working his way through online satellites and tournaments, he would not have gone down in history as the first player to do this. So it was this tournament which was his battle and the end result was his winning of the battle.
It is not the end of the story if you do well one day only, you have to keep score and when the time for the crunch comes, some poker players fold like so much cheap furniture. There are umpteen players who “nearly” made it to the top but collapsed when it came to the crunch. If Chris Moneymaker had folded when it came to the crunch and not made to the final table, even if he had and didn’t win, we still have to ask – would we know today who he is?
The true measure of any poker player is based on their entire career but you have to watch what happens to a player when things are going bad for them. Do they fold like cheap furniture because they are not winning or do they work with the ebb and flows? It is at the worst of time that bad poker players show themselves to be what they truly are, bad losers.
Adversity is good for all of us, but it really marks the bad poker players, so if you see this in yourself, its time for some poker schooling to learn how to deal with the ebbs and flows. If you play rotten, this does not make you a rotten player, but if you throw it all down the toilet because you played rotten, this does make you a rotten player.
