Aside from rake, why do players lose?

Well i agree you should still be able to win without a hud, but it doesnt hurt to have one. It really does help you make decisions and helps your reads. I stick by what i said, it has made me money in so many different ways. If you can have even a little edge why wouldnt you take it. Its like being the slight favorite in a coinflip. i will take being the favorite by 5% than being the underdog.

Emotional swings have a lot to do with the way people play as mentioned. The key is to play when you feel like playing so u can win. Rake honestly is a very small part of why people lose, there are a bunch of different theories but none of them have been proven so your guess is as good as mine but i think emotions and patience are the two biggest things.

JulieK said:

Impatience. People play for an hour or two, then feel like it's time for them to get lucky, and make stupid plays.

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Call or chase like the cat looking for the summer door.

Loosing players don`t understand the game <period>

kingkowboys said:

The reason people lose is because they lack skill, over estimate their ability, do not have patience, can not control their emotions, and/or bad luck. Luck is the biggest reason people lose at poker. No matter how good you are you can never over come the fact that poker is still a game of luck no matter who wants to try and dispute that fact. In other sports and games you can easily overcome the luck factor because of superior play, but in poker you don't have that ability.

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Really? You think that the best poker players don't limit the amount of impact luck because they're superior players?

1. online poker is rigged.
2. The best hand always looses therefor all will go broke to gus hansen.
3. Pocket 4s always cracks pocket aces so never fold them.
4. Ive just been bad beated and i love full tilt poker from the bottom of my heart!

Even ignoring the joke answers, there are many reasons and combinations of reasons why players lose. If I had to pick just one though, it would be over-estimating their own ability level, which leads to playing at levels where they are -EV.

Probably includes not doing the following well. These are all general principles of handling risk.

1. Overcoming fear.
2. Remaining flexible.
3. Taking reasoned risks.
4. Preparing to be wrong.
5. Focusing on reality.
6. Responding to change quickly and decisively.
7. Concentrating on decisions, not outcomes.*

These are all important, but 4 and 7 are the most striking to me because they are ones I might not think of at first.

With 4, when you are taking on any task that includes making decisions with incomplete information, you need an escape plan for when you find out you were wrong. This is why I like small ball poker. It extends the escape window.

With 7, if you concentrate on your decision-making process, rather than worrying about outcomes, you are focusing on that which you can do something about, rather than on that which you can't.

That is, with any set of events (poker hands) where the overall percentage of particular outcomes is predictable, but the outcome of each event is random, it is important that you execute your decision-making consistently so that the expected percentages can work out. Obsessing about winning one hand clouds the bigger picture, and might easily cause you to abandon your normal decision-making process for something that wrecks the percentages.

* List from Inside the Mind of the Turtles, by Curtis Faith

kingkowboys said:

Superior players do try to limit the impact of luck, but luck is more important in poker than other games. Its an intregal and important part of poker. You could never win if you never got a winning hand, you can only bluff so much. If players could actually take luck out of the equation then the top players would never lose, and the final table of the main even WSOP would all be elite pros.

The thread started talking about why good players lose, they lose becasue of luck, or they really aren't that good. When you get sucked out by some donk, they got lucky. Unless you subscribe to the poker is rigged for them theory. If you risked enough money to put you in the red, and they got lucky then you lose.

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So you believe that, hypothetically, the world's best poker player could be losing at, say, 2nl, because he/she is unlucky?

I know exactly why I lose, its called RIVER DONKS, and the proof is in the pudding, when you go play live and you win 90 percent of the time, then you come online and lose 90 percent of the time, there is something very wrong with this picture, my brother has been playing for over 40 years, a very well skilled player and he calls online poker bull shit, and it is, these wonder cards that just happen to land on the river and let the worse hand win, happens way too much, basically online poker sites penalize the good players, they have too or the good players would take all the bad players money and they would stop making a deposit, this crap is so logical its actually sickening. A good one would would be about 3 months ago when my pair of Aces pre flop got cracked 21 times in a row, yes 21 times, if that is not a big smack in the face red light as to, hey something is wrong with this picture, then I dont know what is.

Madness_does said:

I know exactly why I lose, its called RIVER DONKS, and the proof is in the pudding, when you go play live and you win 90 percent of the time, then you come online and lose 90 percent of the time, there is something very wrong with this picture, my brother has been playing for over 40 years, a very well skilled player and he calls online poker bull shit, and it is, these wonder cards that just happen to land on the river and let the worse hand win, happens way too much, basically online poker sites penalize the good players, they have too or the good players would take all the bad players money and they would stop making a deposit, this crap is so logical its actually sickening. A good one would would be about 3 months ago when my pair of Aces pre flop got cracked 21 times in a row, yes 21 times, if that is not a big smack in the face red light as to, hey something is wrong with this picture, then I dont know what is.

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It's rigged yo. Post the HH for those 21 hands please

u should take ur opinion to the rigged thread where u will be attacked in a more entertaining fashion

kingkowboys said:

Superior players do try to limit the impact of luck, but luck is more important in poker than other games. Its an intregal and important part of poker. You could never win if you never got a winning hand, you can only bluff so much. If players could actually take luck out of the equation then the top players would never lose, and the final table of the main even WSOP would all be elite pros.

The thread started talking about why good players lose, they lose becasue of luck, or they really aren't that good. When you get sucked out by some donk, they got lucky. Unless you subscribe to the poker is rigged for them theory. If you risked enough money to put you in the red, and they got lucky then you lose.

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I think this thread though was discussing why people lose in the long term. In the long term there is no luck in poker.

Madness_does said:

my brother has been playing for over 40 years, a very well skilled player and he calls online poker bull shit, and it is, these wonder cards that just happen to land on the river and let the worse hand win

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Your brother is not as good as either of you think he is. He live anywhere near the East coast? We could play HU live and show that perhaps the reason he makes money live is because of the donks, not because there are less of them.

zachvac said:

In the long term there is no luck in poker.

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in poker there is no long term




your move holy man

vanquish said:

in poker there is no long term

your move holy man

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In the long term there is no poker.

Madness_does said:

I know exactly why I lose, its called RIVER DONKS, and the proof is in the pudding, when you go play live and you win 90 percent of the time, then you come online and lose 90 percent of the time, there is something very wrong with this picture, my brother has been playing for over 40 years, a very well skilled player and he calls online poker bull shit, and it is, these wonder cards that just happen to land on the river and let the worse hand win, happens way too much, basically online poker sites penalize the good players, they have too or the good players would take all the bad players money and they would stop making a deposit, this crap is so logical its actually sickening. A good one would would be about 3 months ago when my pair of Aces pre flop got cracked 21 times in a row, yes 21 times, if that is not a big smack in the face red light as to, hey something is wrong with this picture, then I dont know what is.

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This is a classic example of sour grapes from people who have believed for a long time that they are great poker players, come to play online poker and find that actually they aren't as great as they thought they were, and then try to blame it on something or someone else.

Madness_does said:

I know exactly why I lose, its called RIVER DONKS, and the proof is in the pudding, when you go play live and you win 90 percent of the time, then you come online and lose 90 percent of the time, there is something very wrong with this picture, my brother has been playing for over 40 years, a very well skilled player and he calls online poker bull shit, and it is, these wonder cards that just happen to land on the river and let the worse hand win, happens way too much, basically online poker sites penalize the good players, they have too or the good players would take all the bad players money and they would stop making a deposit, this crap is so logical its actually sickening. A good one would would be about 3 months ago when my pair of Aces pre flop got cracked 21 times in a row, yes 21 times, if that is not a big smack in the face red light as to, hey something is wrong with this picture, then I dont know what is.

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This highlights another reason players lose. They always use badbeats as an excuse and do not evaluate their own play - because it was, of course, perfect.

:hahaha:

http://www.learn-texas-holdem.com/texas-holdem-strategy.htm#the-life-long

The life-long poker game

Why do some players win and others lose when everyone gets the same amount of cards? Luck plays a very small role when you start thinking about how many hands a player plays in the course of a year. And remember that each player has the same chance of getting lucky too, so even that isn't biased.

Poker is almost exactly like investing in business. The best investor is a person who takes calculated risks and puts their money into ventures that they think have a good chance of succeeding. Have you ever seen a successful investor that put his money into every stock and continued to do so despite the fact that it has lost all chance of improving? That seems crazy right? But if you play cards you'll see people doing that every day in every hand. They will start out with a hand that would take a miracle to win. Then after seeing the flop with little or no help, they invest more into it either ignoring or oblivious to the fact that another player has a better hand. This continues until the showdown where the majority of the time a smarter player/investor gladly takes their money.

Notice that I used the word "majority". What's great about poker is that occasionally their miracle happens and they win a pot in spite of their bad investing, in spite of the odds, and in spite of their lack of skill. The reason this is so great is because once they win a little here and there playing badly, they won't stop. In psychology the strongest type of conditioning is random reinforcement. The bad player getting lucky sometimes makes him a liner of the skilled players wallets for life. So as you have guessed, you can't be a winning player if you play every hand. A much more selective strategy is necessary. You need to "tighten" up, meaning playing fewer but better hands then your opponents. You need to take calculated risks and put your money behind them. Another analogy is a sniper. You wait for your cards, your mark, and when it makes itself visible you fire, kill, and take the pot. A bad players approach is like a soldier using a machine gun firing away into the distance. Sure something may hit but this isn't the movies, eventually you'll run out of ammo (chips) so you better take your shots more wisely.

Irexes said:

Most people have no idea how little they understand about the game.

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One of the most wise things to understand about poker and life, indeed.

Even very good players can be amazingly myopic and think that answers to questions like "why do people lose" are more right if they apply to people who look mostly like them more than people who don't. Then again, arrogance, like the rake in poker, is insidious, and seen as a smallish enemy when it is not.

For the most part people will answer this question identically to how they would answer: "Why do YOU lose?" while under truth serum.

I think people lose because they are too stupid to win.

Oh oh.. I 'spose I sort of set myself up there, didn't I?

love,
cAPS