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Don't expect miracles, you won't be upset
A situation we are all familiar with. You've been sitting at the poker table playing your local tournament for X number of hours and nothing has come in for the tenth round. However, when the next hand is dealt, a miracle happens. On the button, you find yourself shiny Aces, and, wonder of wonders, two of them! You go from semi-slumbering to a state of mild excitement: "It's finally here! Come on, somebody hit it!" The next few seconds, however, the excitement subsides and is replaced by a spike in blood pressure."Pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass," comes out of the dealer's mouth, as if he were commenting on Spanish football. The action has reached you and there are still only blinds in the pot. You cautiously raise your aces, but after a few seconds you take the pot without a flop. Tragedy? For most of us, certainly. Disappointment and anger are emotions that almost always accompany such a moment. And one would say rightly so.
Now imagine the same situation again, but replace your aces with 32 offsuit. The action folds to you, you raise, and after two more folds, the pot is yours. Tragedy? No way. You've won chips with complete waste, and with no fight, no risk. Great!
How are these two situations different? Same position, same action, same result. The objective reality is identical in both cases. And yet in the first case we shake our heads in disbelief, while in the second we fold our chips with a satisfied smile. So what is the difference? In our expectation with which we entered the game.
When we find 63 off, we don't expect to get anything out of it. Most of the time, we don't expect to play a given game at all, let alone walk away from it with a profit. Therefore, we consider even a simple blind grab to be an excellent result - it's a result, and this is the key, that is ABOVE our expectations, and THAT makes us happy.
But what happens when our starting hand is two aces? We immediately shudder and our heads fill with visions of a big sweat. Unlike 63 off we hope for action. Hopefully someone will re-raise us, maybe we can double up. In short, we see ourselves with a much bigger stack than what's in front of us now. Therefore, we consider a blinds-only showdown to be a very bad result - a result below our expectations and therefore accompanied by a negative reaction. Despite the fact that in both cases we won the game and won exactly the same amount in it.
What does this simple example say and what should we take from it? The point is that very often it is solely our own expectations and ideas about the outcome of a given situation that influence us much more than the objective outcome itself. What matters to us is not what exactly happened, but how much it was in line or not in line with our expectations. And while positive surprises are of course pleasant for us, negative ones can be a frequent and very dangerous bridge trigger for our profitability. They often lead to overplaying our hands and bad calls - it is especially difficult for us to throw away a hand (e.g. a set) from which we expected to win a big pot from the first moment.
It is therefore extremely important to be aware of your own expectations. In many cases, they arise subconsciously, automatically, and becoming aware of them requires active effort. Therefore, try to think about what is going on inside you when you are playing - aces dealt, sets flopped, a chiplead gained in a tournament, etc. Then adjust your expectations and try to bring them closer to reality - most of the time they are far removed from it. Remind yourself that any hand can be lost, and any stack can be lost very quickly - and that these things do happen in poker. It's good and important to be confident, have positive thoughts and believe in yourself. But don't mistake confidence for self-deception and positive thoughts for illusions. You will be angrier at the world than you have any right to be, and you will be depriving yourself of money in the process.