Jerrod Ankenman's Journal

9:56pm: "My best poker"
So there was this email that came out recently on a poker mailing list that I read...perhaps some readers of this column will recognize what I'm talking about. But this email got me thinking about the variation in skill within a single player's play over a matter of days, months, and so on.

Anyway, the gist of one part of this email was "I was playing very well from about February to June, when I was doing well in side games and made some money in tournaments. Then I started playing badly for a few months, just sorta forgot how to play. But lately I feel much better about my play, and I've been doing better."

Now, I know the player in question, and he is not a very good player. He is probably good enough to beat some idiots in low-limit games, but not much more than that. I hope that he doesn't read this or isn't offended by it, but it's almost provably true.

As a result of this my mind instantly translated the above into "I was lucky from Feb to June, then I hit a cold streak for a few months, but lately I've been catching hands again." Now that's reasonable; this player doesn't make his living at the game, and over the amount of hands he likely plays, it's entirely reasonable that regular ups and downs would take place over months at a time. What I'm interested in is the projection of those results onto "how well he was playing."

Now we are all results-oriented to some point. I feel better when I've been winning and worse when I've been losing. Not that long ago, I had a couple of periods when I had lost some confidence in sit-n-go's, for example. Prock has written about the usefulness of having a bread'n'butter game, where you can go to rebuild after taking some bad losses -- some easy game that you can beat for a ton without much variance. That's a lesson that all players who are serious ought to take. Another thing is that online poker provides a mechanism for actually being rationally results-oriented; I mean, if you can play a thousand multi-table tournaments in a year, that's a lot more data than we ever would have had before.

I've also seen some pretty strong players make statements about "I was playing my best poker," especially in reference to tournaments they've won or gotten deep in, or ring games that they've crushed. Now it's possible that that's true. I really don't think so, though. In fact, I think that most players play approximately the same way (or with the same expectation) all the time, with a couple of exceptions:

• Tilt or other physiological effects (being extremely tired, for example, makes me play more passively and turns me from aggressive and tenacious to just a calling station).
• Being underbankrolled for a game.

There are probably other reasons play might degrade, but I think "the zone" concept of some kind of altered state of consciousness in which players play much better than usual is just wrong. This is true even (perhaps especially) for players who rely on reading their opponents as their source of profit. In fact, I would argue that this is exactly what gives rise to the "I was playing my best poker," assertion; when you win, it will often be because your reads were right. Does that mean that your reading ability was stronger? No, just that your guesses as to what the situation was were right. (Anyone who doesn't accept the idea that reads are educated guesses isn't going to listen to me anyway, so...) But this can create in the player a feeling of being "zoned in"; after all, it's not like you get to verify very many reads in a touranment setting anyway, and combining being right about a few critical hands with some confrontation luck is all you need to go far in a typical tournament. I also think that many of the things that players blame their bad results on (fights with girlfriend, etc) are just small impacts.

So I guess the point is that when I win, I didn't play better than usual, I was just luckier. And when I lose, I usually didn't play worse than usual, I was just less lucky. And overall, I win because my base level of play is higher than that of my opponents. And this is true (or it's not:)) for you too.