Luck - Don't Kid Yourself!!

Most people seem to agree with me on this, but recently I had a bit of a debate with a friend of mine who is fairly new to the game and he said that he thought that I had actually played the best and deserved to win BECAUSE I had to come back from 15k. When I pointed out how fortunate that I had been to win every big all-in situation that I got into while moving from 15k to chip leader, he argued that I wasn't lucky because I was favourite to win every time the money went in.

I don't mean to sound like a know-it-all, but my friend is wrong! This is a common mistake made by a lot of players who get outdrawn in the exit hand of their tournament or who get outdrawn in the big pot that they play in their cash session and walk away from the table thinking that they have just been a victim of bad luck. I used to do it myself.

I first discovered Holdem and Omaha in the Jackpot club in Dublin, during my early twenties. Along with a few of my friends, we would make the trip down every couple of weeks to play the Friday night 20 euro re-buy tournament (actually the currency was still punts back then), and then the 1-2 cash game once we got knocked out. The first two nights I went to the casino I won quite a bit in the round of each cash game spinning up 50 punts to over 1k, both times when I had only about 100 in my pocket. The first night I played the tournament I split it 4 ways for £600 with Charlie Power and two other guys who I have since forgotten.

Bearing in mind this amazing success, I'm sure you can understand why I thought at the time I was the best player since... I don't know - I'd never heard of any professional poker players back then. Over the next six months I continued to make regular visits and while I did have some more winning nights, they were vastly out-weighed by the losing nights.

I still thought that I was a great player of course, but I couldn't believe the luck I'd been having. I don't know how many times I drove back to Belfast at 7am with Marty McCabe, both of us absolutely penniless, talking about how unlucky we'd been because Sean Tobin had stuck it all in and busted his or my AA with a 6 high flush draw. We would sometimes talk about how one of us had got unlucky, because we'd lost a £600 pot with QQ v AK on the last hand and went home losing £500 instead of winning £100.

Somewhere between my first and second year playing at this spot, I graduated from being a losing player to a winning player (just about), and I now understood the game well enough to see how incredibly, ridiculously lucky I'd been on my first few trips, when I'd walked away a big winner. More importantly, I could see how stupid I'd been to put all my losses in the past down to bad luck in 1 or 2 hands that I got outdrawn in.

Ok, maybe I had got cruelly outdrawn in a big pot when I was 75% to win - but what about the hand earlier on when I'd got lucky with a flush draw, or the first 2 pots I won, which were both 50-50s? Even if you are good enough/fortunate enough to get your money in as favourite every time, that doesn't mean you're supposed to win every time. If you play 10 pots where you are a 70% favourite, then on average you should expect to win 7 and lose 3. It isn't any more UNLUCKY the 3 times you lose, than it is LUCKY the 7 times you win.

This brings me back to the Pokermillion, where I came back from 15k to have the chip lead. These are the important pots that I won and my chances of winning them when the money went in:

A8 v A3 - 51% to win and 20% to split the pot
KT v 45 - 61% to win
K6 v AJ (on KJ5 flop) 75% to win
JK v 92 68%
AQ v 45 58%

Of course these weren't the only pots that I played and I did accumulate some chips in other small pots. Admittedly in the last 2 situations it was my opponent who had less chips than me, but these were the 5 all-in hands that were key to me moving from 15k to chip leader. As you can see I am a favourite in every hand (lucky in itself, as I was so low I would have had to play with anything in the first 2 hands), but I'm sure the vast majority of you will be very surprised, when I tell you that the combined odds on me winning all 5 of those hands are almost 10/1, (and this only takes me up to the point where I became chip leader... I still had to get lucky after that to win the tournament).

Now as any bookmaker will tell you, 10/1 shots are not supposed to win - well they are, but only very rarely. Winning those 5 hands above, isn't really all that different to winning a pot with nothing but a gut-shot straight draw with one card to come, but we all know which scenario seems more lucky.

My point here is this: It's easy to just look at the hands where you get unlucky and not realise all the times you get lucky yourself - even winning when you have the best hand can be lucky if you win every one of them that you play over a session or a tournament. It can be very dangerous and very misleading indeed to look back at individual hands that you played and decide that you are a winning player who has just been getting unlucky and think that if you just keep doing the same thing then things will change. In some instances that will actually be the case, but probably more often than not, you will find that you are falling into the same trap that I used to all those years ago.

When you're analyzing your play, you shouldn't even be thinking about luck. You should just be thinking of whether or not you made a mistake in the hand and whether or not you could have played it better. If you really want to know whether you're unlucky or just not good enough, then you have to keep records and look at your results over a long period of time. If you're losing a lot over a period of a year or more, then chances are you aren't good enough for the level that you're playing. If that's the case, then if you're not playing for relatively small amounts that you are happy to lose in return for the enjoyment that you get from playing the game, then it's probably a good idea to play lower / play less often / quit altogether - at least until you put some work into becoming a better player.

Poker is all about kidding your opponent, but to have any kind of success at the game then first and foremost, you have to make sure you aren't kidding yourself!