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Message: [QUOTE="F Paulsson, post: 765941, member: 6979"] I actually disagree with this, and it might be semantical, but I have some personal experience with this feeling and it's caused me grief in the past, so: You [I]should[/I] strive to sit at tables where you're the best player, for sure. Game selection is, along with position, the most undervalued "feature" of poker in my opinion. But when you decide that you [I]are[/I] the best - and I use the word "decide" rather than "conclude" intentionally - you may end up in a very detrimental situation. If you've decided you're the best player at the table, hands down, and get outplayed, your ego is going to put up quite a fight against the notion that what just happened was the other player being better. I've been there. I've refused to believe that another player could actually have gotten the best of me and instead tried to twist and turn the situation into how he must have made a mistake, somehow, and he's actually a horrible player. In essence you run the risk of getting a "bad read" on that player. Overly simplified, it means you may tag him as a donk and lose more (or win less, which really comes down to the same thing) than you should have. More in detail, you may compensate in the wrong direction versus that player. An example is in order: If I bet three barrels with JTs unimproved on a scary board vs. an opponent I've thought of as tight (figuring, for whatever reason, that he's likely enough to fold a better hand that it's worth it), and he calls the river bet and shows down 2-2 and drags the pot, I might tag him as a calling station and adjust accordingly, because I "know" that I'm not the kind of player who barrels off bluffs blindly left and right, and there's no way he could have known that I was bluffing. But what if he knows something I don't and was actually being a bit of as sly player? What if he figured that while he wasn't going to be ahead very often, he might have noticed that I try to play well, and therefore knows that I'm likely to note who calls him down lightly (and thus make me stop trying to bluff him in the future) or he simply knows that I exercise pot control and so my only two viable options on this board are "bluffs" and "monsters" or maybe he saw me take a bad beat and deduced that I could be steaming, or... Basically, he might have been making a very smart play in calling me down with what, on the surface, appeared to be a weak hand. If my ego gets in the way of seeing the situation for what it is (and believe me, it has - many times), he just got a huge leg up on me. "Carefully cocky" is what I advocate. Be open to the idea that others at the table [I]might[/I] be better than you are, or at least better than you think they are, and try to think humbly about situations where you lost more than you perhaps should have (or won less, yadda yadda), I think you stand a better chance of not only playing better, but also going into tilt a lot less. I liked your post though, don't get me wrong. :) [/QUOTE]

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