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Message: [QUOTE="Dorkus Malorkus, post: 1405855, member: 6020"] I don't think it's necessarily patience that's the issue. Feel free to tell me I'm way off base, but hunting and fishing are completely different from a psychological perspective from poker. When you're sat at a lake fishing (or in the woods hunting), what happens is ultimately out of your control. You can find what you perceive to be a good spot, pick your bait appropriately and cast your line, but ultimately the excitement is dependent on circumstances that are out of your control. You can do everything right (or as right as possible) and not get a single bite in hours. The vast majority of your excitement is derived from what may happen rather than what is actually happening at a specific moment in time. Poker is hugely different. I think part of your problem is that in poker we can often make our own instantly gratifying excitement, at the expense of optimal play. Say you have a gutshot or something and you're bet into, it's innately exciting when you call and that gutshot hits. Even the thought of that gutshot hitting is exciting - infinitely more exciting than folding and nothing happening, even if folding is the clearly preferable option. This ties in with your BRM problem too. Playing for pennies isn't exciting - playing for significant portions of your bankroll is. Spending an hour after a session analysing your hands isn't exciting, but it's necessary. So yeah, scratch the patience angle. I don't think it's a problem with you being impatient - I think it's a problem with you placing too much emphasis on seeking instant excitement and gratification. Although on the face of it the two seem like the same thing, there are, as I've explained above, subtle differences. Ultimately you are the only one who can choose whether you want to continue as you apparently have been - by viewing poker as entertainment and a gateway to excitement, or by moving the goalposts and changing your entire outlook on what actually is exciting. All the hours and days you spend fishing ultimately seem like they're truly worth it that one time every few months (or however long) you reel in an absolute beast of a fish, and in a similar way it would pay to adjust your mindset so that all the hours and days you spend playing poker in a somewhat unexciting manner suddenly become worth it when in 6 months time (or whatever) you can post a graph that shoots upwards, and when in another 6 months time (or whatever) you can cash out a decent sum of money and buy something funky. Playing optimal poker isn't necessarily instantly rewarding or exciting, but the best players derive their 'excitement' (should they need to derive excitement from poker) from the long-term rewards that playing optimal poker brings. This thread is a good starting point. While I'm not going to patronize you with crap like "YEAH DUDE IT TOOK REAL BALLS FOR YOU TO POST THIS THREAD" because it's ultimately just words on the internet, I will say that this thread is refreshing because of things like every time someone makes a "post your graph" thread >95% of the graphs being upward lines, despite the fact that I'd guess that way over half the semi-regular/regular posters here are still long-run losing players. [/QUOTE]

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