In our previous posts we reviewed Bill Walsh’s experience as a head football coach and how he came to fall into the trap of a negative scoring system as well as how it affected himself and management of the San Francisco 49ers.

Now we are going to work on correlating this to poker to see how it could affect us.

RELATING THE NEGATIVE SCORING SYSTEM TO POKER
Any time that we find ourselves in a situation where our expectations are wholly unrealistic, we are potentially entering into or have entrenched ourselves into the negative scoring system that Coach Walsh discussed.

While I believe that as we progress as poker players we are able to limit or even eliminate results oriented thinking on a small timeframe (i.e., a single hand or maybe even a session), we will still allow some form of results oriented thinking to enter our overall outlook on our game. This is understandable, because if we book a million hands and find ourselves to be break even then we do have to admit something is wrong, so ignoring results is not optimal. Where we can run into an issue with this is if we review our results but fail to manage our expectations.

EXAMPLE #1 - HEATER GONE HORRIBLY WRONG
An example that some of us may have experienced and one that parallels the Bill Walsh negative scoring system (albeit on a much smaller scale), would be a situation in which short term results timed (im)properly skew our expectations.

Say that we start the month off on an unbelievable heater and run at some insane winrate for an extended (e.g., two week) period of time – any winrate will do, but we can choose 22PTBB/100 for our example. Poker is easy at this point, we have figured it out, we are soulreading everyone, etc.. The positive results are great, it is when we fail to manage our expectations and they become overinflated due to our newfound success that our issues begin. We post our sick winrate on the forums as an early brag, we joke about how our winrate is sustainable, and we may even go so far as to extrapolate our winnings out to the end of the month or perhaps just think of how sick our month will be if we finish with the winnings that we have. Assuming that variance is really smiling upon us at this point, there is a high likelihood that we have nowhere to go but down, due to the simple fact that even variance that is still moderately in our favor will not allow us to maintain our 22PTBB winrate. Before we know it that magical 22PTBB is floating down around 20’ish…we think that if we can just stay at 20PTBB for the month how sick that will be, so we adjust our game to play a more conservative style and bleed our way below 20PTBB. Once we dip below 20PTBB, we now start to press to push ourselves back over that magical landmark we have set and bleed a bit more profusely this time and find ourselves down around 17PTBB. Our “pressing” moves into a “meltdown” and we end up donking off too many BI in a less than optimal state and finish the month with a winrate of 12PTBB/100, but more importantly we are actually depressed at what most would consider to be excellent results and in the midst of putting ourselves into a full blown downswing possibly doubting our ability and future as a poker player.

The example that I have given above use somewhat arbitrary numbers (they are actually taken from results that I experienced early in my career). Our “sick” winrate could be 33PTBB, or 12PTBB, or 6PTBB and the duration could be a week, two weeks, two months. The exact numbers are not totally relevant (though understanding our limitations and realizing what we consider a “sick” winrate is a good thing). What is relevant is that we have to maintain our awareness in regards to the management of expectations.

EXAMPLE #2 - SESSION TO SESSION
Example #1 is a fairly drastic scenario in which our expectations become horribly skewed. There are other, less drastic examples that we could look at that are more likely to occur to us and while they will most likely not have as much of a negative effect on our game and our results they can chip away at our winrate.

Consider how we enter into a session immediately following a winning session. If we ran amazingly well, hitting flops and getting paid with crazy hands like small suited connectors and one gappers, are we going to continue to play those properly (i.e., in position against opponents that pay off with marginal hands) or do we start to open them earlier and start calling 3-bets oop against opponents that will not payoff if we wake up with a monster? If we begin to "misplay" our suited connectors/one-gappers based upon the results of our previous session it will have an adverse effect on our winrate. This adverse effect is caused by our unrealistic expectation of the performance of these types of hands.

NEXT TIME
Our next post will take a look at ways to help with maintaining our expectations and avoiding “Zero points…” situations.