What makes a bad facebook poker player?

As with almost all things in this life, most people don’t like taking responsability for their shortcomings or mistakes. Burn down your house? It’s the toasters fault. Crash your car? A dog ran across the road officer. Lose your job? Bankrupt a company? Cheat on your wife? “Not my fault!”

It would seem that the same thing applies to facebook poker, noone likes to admit when they’re a bad player, so if they lose all their facebook poker chips it’s generally someone elses fault.. so they say. They’ll blame it on other players, their internet connection, horrible luck, the alignment of the stars – anything to avoid having to admit that they might have played poorly or made a bad decision. Here are a few qualities of exceptionally bad poker players, which ones apply to you?

1) You hate math - At its most fundamental level, poker is a game all about numbers. What are your pot odds? How many outs do you have? What percentage of the pot should you raise when you have a good hand? These can all be answered with even the most basic level of statistical and mathematical knowledge, no more complicated than what you might learn in the 10th grade. But most people just refuse to use it, either from an inability to understand it or mental laziness. You don’t have to be a math genius to figure out that if you have a pocket pair you have a 1 in 8 chance of getting three of a kind on the flop. Knowing this would help you decide how many facebook poker chips to bet instead of just making blind raises.

2) You have no discipline - Ask the pros in poker what they believe their best quality to be and most of them will tell you it’s their discipline. Anyone can read a book about poker or watch the WSOP tournaments on television, but it takes strict discipline to win consistently at poker. If you can’t be discriplined at the poker tables, you’re susceptiple to spells of boredom that will cause you to call when you should fold, raise when you should check, etc. Without discipline any bad beat can easily put you on tilt and make you lose all your facebook poker chips.

3) You’re shortsighted - No I don’t mean you wear glasses or have contacts, but rather you can’t see the forest for the trees. In other words, you don’t plan for the long term. You may be great for those first 1000 hands of poker and maybe you can even win yourself a nice stack of facebook pokerchips to make you look like a bigshot. But what good is working for all those chips if you always sit at a table with your whole stack? You might convince yourself that you’d never go all in unless you have a royal flush, but emotions always tend to make people do illogical things at inopportune times. You may think you have the perfect hand and someone elses “more perfect” hand will knock you right on your ass. If you didn’t plan for the future and keep some chips on the side you are now broke and out of the game. Always keep some chips aside for a rainy day. Otherwise you’ll find yourself constantly scrambling to buy facebook poker chips again.

facebook-poker-fool

4) You’re emotionally imballanced - This one is pretty straightforward. If you’re a little on the crazy side, if you’re prone to emotional outbursts, or have an overall dramatic personality, poker may not be the game for you. If you’re an emotional wreck in real life chances are you will carry this over to the poker table. You won’t be able to recognize when you’ve starting tilting and playing angry and you certainly won’t know when to stand up and walk away from the game and take a breather. Emotional players tend to play with an all or nothing mentality, for example “I’m either gonna win back all my facebook chips or go broke”. Emotions and poker don’t mix.

5) You can’t stand losing - This ties in with being emotionally imbalanced but it’s a very big factor of being a bad facebook poker player. If you feel that losing a hand is an insult to your ego or manhood or pride, then you should try playing shuffleboard instead. Losing is as much a part of poker as death is a part of life, it’s inevitable and it eventually happens to everyone, get used to it.

6) You need to see instant results - Patience is another quality bad texas holdem poker players lack. If they sit at a table and don’t flop a straight within 20 hands they start cursing their luck or going on about what a terrible night it is. If this sounds like you, then you might be a bad facebook poker player. You’d be better off renting a movie and cooling off a bit.

7) You hate chance – This is an important one, because lets face it, no matter how good you are or how many hands you’ve played or how many facebook poker chips you’ve won, at the end of the day chance and luck rule the field, especially in the short term. Are the players who win the world series of poker tournaments in las vegas the best players in the world? Of course not, but they’re all great players who happened to find a streak of luck and were able to use their skills to take advantage of that streak and make it to the top. Maybe the players who lost even played better than them and by all logical conclusions should have won, but logic and poker don’t always go hand in hand. Sometimes the donkey who calls with nothing will beat your flopped straight because he caught the flush on the river and ended up winning all your facebook poker chips.

If all these sound too familiar and you’re starting to think I might be talking about you, then maybe it’s time you starting taking the time to improve or change your playing style. Nobody want’s to be a facebook poker donkey.