Poker is about decisions not results
There is a very strong tendency to be results orientated when you play Texas Hold’em poker but this is a big mistake for several reasons. At the end of the day, results in the short term can be a very poor indicator of skill. It is for this reason why players have turned pro thinking that they were beating the game while others have packed the game up in the belief that they were a losing player. It is quite possible for two players with identical skill sets to have totally different results over sample sizes that most players would deem impossible. I have seen players who have recorded unbelievable earn rates for 100,000 hands only to then break even over the next 100,000 hands.
It is wrong to concentrate on results in the short term because of two reasons. Firstly as stated then results in the short term can and are a very poor indicator of longer term success and also because short term results simply cannot be controlled. Let us imagine a poker player called “Rob” who set himself an absolutely impossible goal of never having a losing day playing online. Even if he multi-tables and gets a large number of hands in per hour, the variance is so severe in poker that he can never guarantee a winning day because he could never play enough hands to make sure that he never had a losing day.
So the short term volatility in poker means that short term results simply cannot be controlled and are almost chaotic in nature. Your main goal as a poker player is to concentrate on your decisions and try to make sure that they are as solid as possible. Forget about being right all the time, poker is a game of incomplete information at the end of the day. You are playing a game where your goal is to make good calculated decisions based on odds and probabilities. This is how financial day traders work and stock market specialists. They know that having winning trades all the time is impossible and they allow for losing.
As a poker player then you must do this as well. If you are making good decisions solidly and consistently then money will surely follow. If it doesn’t after doing this then this is a sure sign that you are in the wrong games and playing at a level that is too tough for you. So your motto when you play online or live for that matter is to concentrate on “decisions and not outcomes”. If you run a bluff against a player who called you down with top pair to take the pot then review your play. You review your play for one very important reason and this is because you need to get some kind of a fix on your decision making processes. If you are making bad decisions then you have something of a problem. You can make a lot of money in online poker making great decisions. You can also make good money making decent decisions but if you make bad decisions constantly then you are going to have trouble making poker pay.