Hold em Strategy – Escaping Loosing Streaks part 2

So, you need to conquer this fear of loosing? Start by understanding that loss is a natural and necessary part of the game and your poker training. Poker is one long game, winning is not done game by game, hand by hand remember this and make it the underlying rule of your hold em strategy. You must understand that the odds of never loosing are 0. This means you will have loosing hands and you will have loosing tables and you will have loosing days. But the better you get the less frequent they will become and players often report that they become less emotionally attached to the game as their skill improves, to the point where losing, even losing big just becomes an aspect of the game.

So your aware you do it, but changing the habit isn’t as easy as telling yourself to stop it, so how do you ‘stop it’. Well first of all accept that this won’t happen all at once, permit yourself to go easy on yourself and try these methods on for size, stick with the one or two that work best for you:-

Move to a table with significantly different stakes – Changing stakes up or down can sometimes shake off the feeling of an impending loosing streak. Moving down will relax you and make you less attached to high poker hand rankings and moving up will focus you. Do what feels right, if the idea of going higher scares you go lower, if lower frustrates you go higher.

Slow down – Fold! Then fold again. Allow the sting of loss and the mad panic to regain those losses to ebb away, this is a great hold em strategy.  No that hole in your stack won’t become permanent if you don’t fill it immediately, prove it to yourself, let it sit. Concentrate on your opponents, study their games and you’ll be in a better position to win when you rejoin the game – only rejoin when you feel calm and unemotional.

Remember your last big win – Really let yourself revel in the victory, let the positive emotions of that game cancel out your current negative ones. Remind yourself that you are more experienced now than you were then with more at table poker training, and imagine the loss you just suffered fuelling this training, fuelling your future wins. You learn more from the games you loose than the ones you win. Tell yourself that game made you more money in the long run than you lost.

Play to win not play to ‘win back’ - Never set out to win back what you have lost! This creates urgency which is never good in a game of strategy, be it poker, chess or playing the stock exchange. Just set out to beat your opponents, concentrate on the players not the money.