Poker Winner Blog

Deciding If the Prize Is Worth the Game

Winning poker players usually won’t draw to a flush when the odds against making it are 3-to-1 or more, but the pot promises a payoff of only two dollars for each dollar invested. They’ll wait until the pot promises a bigger payoff before risking their money.

The analogy is also true away from the table. While real-life payoffs can vary widely, your investments are usually time, money, or both. Is it worth your time to spend half a day trying to make a small sale without the promise of greater rewards down the road, or are you better off courting one of your bigger, better customers?

Whenever you analyze situations like this, the answers often seem obvious. Still, many people fritter away large amounts of time, not realizing that they are being horribly unproductive in the process. Office workers spend hours dealing with problems and issues that may be urgent, but are often neither significant nor important.

Better time management frees you from dealing with issues that have small payoffs associated with them. If you aspire to success, you’ll look for chances to capitalize on opportunity, rather than spend your time fighting small, insignificant brush fires.

Reaching for Objectives

If you have no standards to guide you in selecting the hands you choose to play and adopt an any-two-cards-can-win philosophy, it probably won’t be long until you lose all your poker money. Knowing in advance which cards you’re going to play, what position you’ll play them from, and how you’llhandle different opponents are key factors to success at the poker table. The real world is no different. If you don’t plan, you’re just a leaf in the wind. While traveling in a random direction does get you somewhere, it’s probably not where you hoped to go.

Poker teaches you to plan, to have an agenda, and to pursue it aggressively. In the real world, if you don’t have your own agenda, you’ll soon be part of someone else’s. In fact, it’s probably safe to assume that if you examined every person foolish enough to join a cult, you’d find very few of them with a plan or a set of governing values to guide them.

Being Responsible

Everyone, it seems, has a favorite bad beat story. It won’t take long until you’ve heard them all and grow weary of them. Whenever someone launches a misery-laden tale in the direction of poker author Lee Jones, he announces that he charges a $1 fee to listen to each bad beat story. Some people are so bent on sharing their woeful tales that they toss him a chip and go right on talking.

No one wants to hear you whine at the poker table. So you lost in a way that defied all imaginable logic and odds. Enough, already. It doesn’t change anything. You’ll never be a successful poker player until you accept full and complete responsibility for the results you achieve.

Real life is much the same. Success in any field demands a willingness to be held accountable for your actions. Don’t expect sympathy because you weren’t born with Rockefeller’s money, Einstein’s brains, or Tom Cruise’s looks. Neither were most folks. Get up. Get on your feet. Play the cards you were dealt — in poker and in life — and go on from there. Like successful poker players, those who are successful in real life are willing to place the blame for their failures right where it belongs — squarely on their shoulders.

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