Are You Up for a Game of Poker?
We all know how easy it is to play online poker, don't we? You turn on your PC and within a minute or so you are logging on to www.never-lose-at-poker.com (not real so don't bother looking) and away you go with your hard-earned money. The ease at which we can play poker and the sheer speed can be very seductive. No more driving to smoke-filled card rooms miles away, the action's all here in the comfort of your own home.
Perfect, what could be better than this? Well, let's just think about that for a minute because it may not be the nirvana you think it is. Let me give you a scenario here, something that happens in homes all over the world. You arrive home from work after having been reprimanded by your boss unfairly. You are very angry, but you have other things on your mind: Your teenage daughter has been skipping school without anyone's consent, and you have been arguing with your neighbor about the mess their dog keeps doing on your lawn.
Everyday events experienced by normal people like you and me, so what's the problem? Well, there is no problem initially, but you intend to play in an online no-limit game later that same evening because you have been looking forward to it all day. Your wife is out with friends and you are in the house all by yourself with no distractions. But you leave the television on in the same room, you are not looking directly at it but the sound is reaching your ears all the same.
You notice the dirty marks on the wall behind the computer because your wife is forever telling you to redecorate the room. You also check your e-mail because you are expecting an important reply about your job. You are troubled by the events of the day, you have read several poker books and read numerous times that you should never play when you are disturbed or distracted, but what harm can it do? You get dealt a succession of worthless hands and you, the king of discipline, immediately fold them.
What Happened?
Not a problem, fold... fold... fold... hand after hand hitting the mechanical muck. You commend yourself for playing so tightly. You bought in for a thousand bucks and you will just wait until some knucklehead makes a mistake and passes you his entire stack.
That's the plan, and it's foolproof. You have read a few poker books so that makes you better than all of the "suckers" at this table.
Five hands later and wallop, your thousand bucks are gone and you curse your rotten luck. You end up hitting a flush that is not the nuts and someone else has the nut flush. Just bad luck... or was it? The fact is that you have been horribly guilty of letting your head stray from the game and that is a lot easier to do in online poker than it is in the real world.
You should have been watching the players more closely and not just playing your own cards. You thought you were watching them closely, but obviously not closely enough, not when you keep glancing at the TV and checking your e-mail. Not when you are reliving the conversation that you had with your boss every five minutes. You weren't aware enough to notice the absolute "rock" in seat six who hasn't played a hand in 30 minutes and every time that he plays, he has the nuts or close to it.
The point is you were not in a stable, focused frame of mind and you should not have been playing. You were kidding yourself. Isn't it funny how poker lessons only really hit home after you have lost money, but I guess that applies to most things in life. You can read this a thousand times but until it happens to you personally, you will never really comprehend it.