I have spent a lot of time in these columns talking about bad beats, downswings and tilt, which are all related to luck, but sometimes it pays to take a step back and look at the more fundamental question. What exactly constitutes luck in poker?

The first thing to realise is that luck in poker is more or less zero-sum. Any money that you win at poker comes from the other players in the game. Therefore any piece of good luck you experience directly corresponds to bad luck experienced by your opponents either singly or collectively. Likewise any piece of bad luck you experience is reflected in good luck for your opponent. It’s not quite a perfect model, because all the time we have the rake chipping away at our stacks, acting as a leech on the ‘good luck pool’. But for practical purposes we can consider luck to be zero sum. If somebody’s gutshot hits, somebody’s top pair, or other winning hand, got drawn out on. If player A is getting no good cards, then players B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I and J are collectively winning more than their fair share of pots, with hands that might otherwise have lost.

I am a big advocate of reviewing hands in order to improve your poker game. In fact, as internet players, it is one of the most powerful tools we have. Looking at a hand with the luxury of time and the ability to seek a second opinion can work wonders for your ability to spot leaks and identify better lines than the one you originally took.

What many players don’t realise is that reviewing past hands can also be good for managing your psychological game. In my Poker Tracker database, I have four hands that I have kept and frequently refer back to, not because they teach me anything in particular about the technical aspects of the game, but because when I am running badly and lamenting my misfortune I can remind myself about the role of luck in poker and how the pendulum of variance swings in both directions with equal vigour. Each of these hands, in subtly different ways, helps put bad beats and downswings in perspective for me.

I’m running badly at the moment. Well, hopefully by the time you read this I won’t be, but at time of writing I am definitely courting the dark side of variance. However, I did make a pretty good play earlier today that saved me two big bets.

The game was five-handed and the player under the gun raised. I re-raised with AK from the button and the blinds folded. I hadn’t played too much with the UTG player, but he seemed to be a reasonable player and hadn’t made any obviously bad plays in the time I had been there. The flop was AJ5 with two clubs. He checked and called my bet. He check-called again on the turn, which was and off-suit 6. The river was the J of diamonds, he checked and I checked behind. He showed QJ and took the pot with his trips. Had I bet, I would have been forced to make a crying call of his check-raise and lost two extra bets.

Everybody likes to think that they are ‘logical’, but in poker as well as every day life, many people show weakness in this area. They will make poor decisions and act in ways that are irrational, because they fail to follow a rational thought process to its conclusion. In The Poker Mindset we call this phenomenon ‘Woolly Thinking’. The data input is in place and a decision is reached, but somewhere in between, the wires are crossed.

The level of thought required to arrive at the correct logical conclusion can vary from trivial to very deep indeed. Some problems are too complex for even the greatest minds to think their way through. On the other hand, there are some far simpler situations where trivial errors of logic are routinely made. Many of these have been categorised and labelled by philosophers as ‘logical fallacies’. Several of these are commonly seen at the poker table and are detailed in this article.

What is the appeal of poker?

Some say it’s the gambling aspect. The thrill of putting your money in the pot with an uncertain of outcome, the adrenaline rush of winning and losing money at the turn of a card and the thought of hitting some big hands and leaving the table a big winner. Others would argue that it is the appeal of the game itself. The idea of trying to outwit your opponent, the puzzle solving element and trying to make the best possible decision with incomplete information. Your answer to this question will depend on who you are, because different people are attracted to poker for different reasons. Some are attracted to the gambling aspect of poker, while some are lured by the gaming element. These two groups of people can loosely be described as ‘gamblers’ and ‘gamers’.

We begin the journey the first time we play poker. When we sit down in a casino, online or (more often than not) in a home game. We start as complete beginners, but from there we develop as players, improving our play, discipline and attitude. Hopefully our play will continue to improve and we will eventually become winning players and then move on to beat bigger and bigger games.

Of course, it doesn’t quite work like that most of the time. Not every player is destined to become a feared high limit player. Not every player is destined to become a winning player at all. In fact the majority won’t, they will be losing players indefinitely or until they eventually give up playing. Nothing is destined in poker. You will improve as a player as long as you put in the work and have the ability to grasp the concepts involved. Simply playing poker for a long time does not make you a good player. Likewise, being a relative beginner does not necessarily make you a bad player.

“Your upswing was obviously pure luck (variance) and the downswing was obviously mostly caused by terrible play... at least that's the opinion I've been reading in other threads around here.” – ‘Ben’ on the internettexasholdem.com poker forum 1/31/06.

I read the above when browsing through some old forum posts and it made me think. Further browsing led me to several other discussions about the nature of downswings. To what extent are they caused by bad luck and to what extent are they caused by bad play? Of course both of these terms are relative and subjective, so there is no definite answer to this question, but consider it a topic to ponder.

The problem that most poker players have, at least to start with, is that they will attribute their wins to good play and their losses to bad luck. They will have a winning session and feel like they are the best player in the world, then they will have a bad session and curse their bad luck. This cycle will repeat over and over, until eventually they will conclude that they are simply an unlucky person (or that online poker is rigged).

It is not a comfortable thought, but every poker player might one day have to deal with the possibility of losing their entire bankroll. There are a number of ways that this might happen, but essentially it will boil down to one of the following:

1. You are not good enough to beat the game and so losing your bankroll is merely the result of the long term taking hold.
2. You have the ability to beat the game but play while on tilt, losing large amounts of money while not playing your best.
3. You can beat the game, but have poor bankroll management skills and so go broke during a downswing.
4. You have good bankroll management, but have a downswing so severe that you lose it all anyway.

At time of writing, England have just beaten Ecuador 1-0 in the soccer World Cup to progress to the quarterfinals. It was a scrappy game, in which England were the better side but were unable to really put the game away. The headlines in the English sports pages this morning were mostly negative. “A lacklustre team performance against an unconvincing Ecuador”, claimed one major website, with others carrying similar slants. (For those of you who aren’t soccer fans, bear with me, I am going somewhere with this).

Thinking back to the game makes me realise what a thin line there is between success and failure or, in this instance, a ‘good’ performance and a ‘bad’ performance. If England had taken more of their chances and walked away 2-0 or 3-0 winners, then no doubt the press would have been full of praise for the side, claiming that we were finally fulfilling our potential after a disappointing start to the tournament. They talk about a lacklustre performance, but what they really mean is a lacklustre result.

Remove all emotion from decisions, but …
Editor’s note: This column contains excerpts from the book The Poker Mindset: Essential Attitudes for Poker Success, by Ian Taylor and Matthew Hilger.

The Poker Mindset discusses seven essential attitudes for achieving poker success. One of these attitudes is to “remove all emotion from decisions.” Many players let emotions affect their poker decisions, yet emotions should have no impact whatsoever on the decision-making process.

In some sports, emotion can be an advantage. For example, a football coach may try to motivate his players by stirring up emotions of anger, hatred, or team spirit, which may arouse them into working a bit harder or giving a bit extra.