What it Takes

To be a winning poker player, one must possess a combination of many qualities, the easiest of which being skill. Poker as a skill is quite easy to learn and most people of even modest intelligence would be able to learn a +EV playing strategy, either by reading forums & literature or being mentored from someone else who knows the game. I've known players who are smarter than I with a better understanding of the game who have had results far below my own. It's all of the other qualities a player must possess that makes it so hard to be a long term winner in poker.

Gugel made a post in his blog saying in summary, that a player needs to master 3 things: hand reading, emotional control, and strategy. In my opinion, hand reading and strategy should count as one entity. Both of these are your concious mind at work trying to defeat your opponent. It's no coincience that both of these things go out the window when you are not emotionally stable. What I am saying is this, there are rarely instances when a player player is great at one of these and bad at the other, the two qualities go hand in hand.

For me, emotional control is far more important and should be broken down into even smaller parts. The first and most obvious part is tilt. How easily and badly does the player tilt? The worse they tilt, the worse off the are. The second part is how sensitive they are to money and it's real-world value. Some players are not capable of keeping the monetary value of their bets out of their mind. Instead of playing for BB's these players see dollar signs and fear enters their game. For these players, success at the higher limits will never happen until they can let go. A third segment is mental endurance/focus. Sure it's easy to win over the course of a month or two, but when faced with a bit of bad luck is this player able to maintain his level of play? It's easy to get tunnel vision when playing large amounts of hands. Some players simply get bored with the game and dont put in hands unless they get stuck. A fourth aspect is confidence/self-awareness. Some players tilt and dont even realize it. They are unaware that their play is at such a low level so they go on feeling good about their decisions when in reality their play is poor. Conversely, there are players who, when in a rut, doubt the quality of their play and start to adjust their game when no adjustments were necessary to begin with.

In the short run, it's not hard to be a very good poker player, but what I admire most is when I see someone's graph, regardless of limits, looks like a positive linear line over a large sample of hands. My graph of course consists of spans of steady winning followed by a sharp dropoff repeated a few times over 200k hands. I can never seem to quite keep my mind in check for too long without crashing from time to time.

The level of thinking that goes on in Phil Ivey's mind versus a 50NL grinder on a good day is not as desparing as some may believe. To me, it's those who are mentally sound within themselves who are truely great. When a player can continue to play top notch poker regardless of stakes or previous shortcomings and do so day in and day out. This is what I aspire towards.