Results Oriented Thinking In Poker

The Mistake

Poker Gives Feedback That Is Honest In The Long Run And Misleading In The Short Run. A Good Decision Can Lose And A Bad One Can Win, And A Single Hand Does Not Tell You Which You Made. Judging By The Result Feels Natural, Because The Result Is What You See And Feel, But It Trains You To Repeat Lucky Mistakes And To Abandon Unlucky Good Plays.

The Classic Example Is A Strong Hand All In Before The Flop Against A Weaker One. The Strong Hand Might Win Four Times In Five. When It Loses, Nothing About The Decision Was Wrong. When A Weak Hand Calls And Wins, Nothing About That Decision Was Right.

Thinking In Decisions

The Fix Is To Evaluate The Decision With The Information You Had At The Time. What Range Did Your Opponent Likely Hold? What Price Were You Getting? What Were Your Alternatives, And What Was Each Worth On Average? If The Answer Holds Up, The Decision Was Good, Whatever Happened Next.

Expected Value Is The Tool For This. Every Choice Has An Average Outcome Over All The Ways The Hand Could Have Gone, And That Average Is What Your Skill Controls. The Single Outcome You Saw Is One Draw From That Set, And On Its Own It Tells You Almost Nothing.

A Useful Habit Is To Write The Decision Down Before You Know The Result, When Reviewing Hands. Hide The River Card And The Showdown, Decide What You Would Do And Why, And Only Then Reveal How The Hand Ended. It Removes The Pull Of The Result From Your Judgement.

Where Results Do Matter

Results Still Matter In Large Numbers. Over Tens Of Thousands Of Hands, Your Results Converge On The Sum Of Your Decisions, And A Sustained Gap Between What You Expect And What You Get Is Worth Investigating. The Skill Is In Knowing How Large A Sample Needs To Be Before It Means Anything, And The Variance Lesson In This Series Puts Numbers On That.

Results Also Carry Information About Opponents. A Player Who Shows Down A Surprising Hand Has Told You Something About Their Range, And That Is Worth Remembering. The Trick Is To Learn From What The Hand Revealed, Not From Who Won It.

Practise It On Smarter.Poker

The Answer Above Is Complete. When You Want To Drill It, These Are The Matching Training Tools.

• Play Result Detachment The Training Game For This Lesson.
• Open Jarvis Training Insights Jarvis Explains Your Training Decisions In Words.