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Entry #2: Bouncebackability
Question: What do Tiger Woods, David Beckham, Lennox Lewis, Arsenal and us poker players have in common?
Answer: We have all experienced failure. Obviously some of us are more familiar with failure than others, but poker is rather special in that it deals out more setbacks than any sport as the mechanics of the game generate countless potentially negative situations. Sit in a ring game and each new set of hole cards brings with it yet another opportunity to lose money, while the buy-in for a much awaited multi-table tournament with juicy prizes might provide us with less then a minute's play in the case, for example, of an unsuccessful all-in on the opening hand. It is how we react to these reverses and - perhaps more importantly - our attitude to the absolute inevitability of 'unfortunate' events in the usually not-too-distant future, that determines the extent or otherwise of our success.
Next question: What does my favourite television programme, SKY's excellent (live) Soccer AM, have to do with the ups and downs of poker?
Answer: Bouncebackability! The show has a campaign to see this word included (through popular usage) in the Oxford English Dictionary, and the online poker community has more reason to champion the cause than most as bouncebackability is a key quality of a successful poker player. The fact that losing (or not winning) is a cold, hard fact of poker life doesn't prevent it from rendering most players incapable of operating normally when they next go into battle. Too many would-be serious poker enthusiasts number-crunch their way through pre-flop probabilities tables and turn/river draws and so on yet find themselves knocked sufficiently off-balance by a bad beat that subsequent play goes against everything they have learned, even a brief tilt period capable of wiping out hours of hard work.
We know we're going to lose at some point, that our share of bad luck is lurking in the virtual shadows. We read about the dangers of being phased by losing and seek to exploit the weaknesses of others, but then we fail to put life into perspective when it happens to us. Most players seriously lack bouncebackability, and until they properly address the issue will continue to impede any progression or chance of success. This is equally true whether you favour ring games or prefer tournaments.
Poker requires skill but is nevertheless a great leveller, with the cards having no respect for the reputations of those players to whom they are being dealt. Take, for example, 32Red's recent Beat The Mob V tournament, where each of the four Hendon Mob professionals had bounties of $200 for anyone who could eliminate them from the 398-player No Limit event. So how did the Mob perform? Ram Vaswani was out before I'd adjusted my chair to the required height for a long tournament (or so I thought), 'finishing' in 394th place. Ross Boatman soon followed him in 357th, and when Joe Beevers went out in 259th I noticed some of the players commenting that these experts couldn't be 'that good' if they were already out (Barny Boatman was up their with the leaders throughout and was sitting pretty on a decent stack until he crashed out in 18th; congratulations to PPScrew21 for winning the tournament and just short of $2000 for his efforts). But herein lies the very essence of how top players differ from lesser players - nobody likes losing, and it will always leave a sour aftertaste, but these days there is no shortage of other opportunities, and the likes of the Hendon Mob and other winning players have bouncebackability in that they have come to terms with the fact that losing is inevitable and that they have no control of what fate deals them. Instead they concentrate on the next hand (upon which past events have no emotional influence) and continue along the correct path by maintaining maximum control of their usually sound decision making process.
Anyone can lose, so a player's ability cannot be measured by his/her reverses. But winning with some degree of consistency is another story, and one which first requires an appreciation of the previous fact.
Top poker players have taken bouncebackability to another level, demoting each individual instance of failure to an almost trivial, 'everyday fact of life' inconvenience status. Their secret is quite simple - unlike the vast majority of players yet to get to grips with losing, successful players don't consider there is anything sufficiently worrying to bounce back from...
Have a good week!
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