Late stage S&Gs, selective memories, and mindfulness

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Quote of the day: “some people would have trouble folding a napkin, let alone a poker hand” underdawg7 on Paradise Poker

A friend of mine who plays mostly 10-player Sit-and-Go tournaments (S&Gs) online sent me an email that he is having frustrations. He claims that late in tourneys with fairly large sized blinds, he is pushing with AK following a limper and getting called by 33 and 44. He was questioning the benefit of the raise, since they call him and he is slightly less than 50% to win. I asked what I felt was a logical question, whether he was making the same raise with 88, and he said that he was and that he always got called by AJ. So how could he possibly be winning in the long run by making these raises? Well, the answer is very simple, but his logic is distracted by selective memory. Selective memories are abundant in the poker world, because the negatives moments in poker produce far stronger emotions than the positives.

Before going on to an analysis of this all-in move with AK, I thought this was a good time to introduce a Zen concept which I will talk about more in later posts. Once you begin to have some good poker ideas (which you will continue to enhance by using learning tools), I feel this is the most important concept in all of poker. It is the concept of mindfulness. Mindfulness is being in the moment, totally and completely aware of our surroundings and situation. It may be easiest to understand this concept by looking at its antithesis, mindlessness. We refer to someone as being in a mindless state when they are doing several tasks at once or even just one task in a very automatic way. Meanwhile, their mind is never fully involved in any of the tasks they are performing. For instance, someone might pet her cat, watch a television show, talk on the phone, and cook dinner all at one time. Yet, she does not notice the pattern of the bubbles in the stew, she doesn’t actually feel all of the textures of her cat, she misses out on the subtlest joke on the TV show, and she misinterprets what her friend was trying to say on the phone. This is all because she is not truly mindful of any of the single things she is doing. This can also happen when doing only one task at a time yet not being mindful of that task, but rather being distracted with other thoughts. Distractions are anything that does not directly apply to the task at hand. Most of these distractions are either from our external surroundings or from our thoughts, thoughts of things that happened in the past or worries for the future. These past and future thoughts serve no purpose to enhance our present moment, and can only be distractions. The distractions serve no positive purpose to our task, and can only be negative. At the same time, while involved in our present task, we can do nothing to change the past or prepare for the future. So our task and our distractions are completely at odds with each other. The only way to reach a mindful state is to eliminate the distractions from our mind. This is not easy to do, and is part of the reason many people use meditation, to practice ridding themselves of distractions and focus on the moment.

In a poker game, distractions are all around us. Many of them are emotional distractions, from bad beats, disagreements with someone at the table, or downright frustration of not winning a hand or a tournament for an extended period of time. Many other distractions come from our surroundings, people talking at the table, people playing slowly, dealer distractions, cocktail waitresses; or on the internet any of the distractions at home, like other people at the house, television, telephone, etc. Still other distractions come from regrets of the past or worries of the future, whether a past poker hand,, a financial worry, time concern, or just the fear of losing another poker tournament and how your peers will view you.

One of the problems with S&Gs is that they are full of mindless plays. That is also what makes it so easy to play several of them at a time online, because they lend themselves to mindlessness better than any other form of poker. So, while we could just elect to push our AK because we are programmed to do so, let’s instead get into our mindful state and analyze this situation, with no distractions.

But let’s do it tomorrow, ‘cause I was out at a poker game all night and right now I am distracted by being very, very tired.