Team Full Tilt
August 7, 2006At this year's World
Series of Poker, there are thousands of players walking
the halls of the Rio. Moving through the corridors,
you're bound to hear players telling tales of the hands
that bounced them from tournaments. Often, the players
are upset as they tell the stories of bad beats and
lousy luck. The Full Tilt Poker pros also share stories
of their more interesting hands. However, among the
pros, you're far more likely to hear someone say
something like, "I played that really badly."
The best players have the ability to acknowledge and
learn from their mistakes - it's one of the qualities
that make them so good. John D'Agostino noted, "When you
listen to the general public you hear, ‘I got so
unlucky.' Generally, all you hear the pros talk about is
how they played a hand poorly. We understand we make
mistakes and we try to get better from them."
Chris Ferguson noted that humility is vital to
winning poker. "To improve, you have to know you're
making mistakes," Ferguson said. "There are a lot of
hands I don't know how to play. There are a lot of
situations I don't know how to handle. If I thought I
knew everything, I'd never improve."
How often do the pros make mistakes? D'Agostino says,
"[We] make mistakes almost every single hand. They're
small mistakes, but maybe I could have gotten paid off a
little more on a given hand or avoided a bluff."
Howard Lederer says, "To become a pro or a really
good player, you have to become brutally objective about
your game. If you aren't, you won't make the changes and
improvements you need."
While Lederer believes in the need for tough
self-assessment, he notes that there's no need to dwell
on past errors. "You have to be honest with yourself and
you can't gloss over mistakes," he says, "but there's no
need to beat yourself up. You need to learn from the
mistakes and move on.""
Many of the pros refuse to discuss hard-luck hands in
detail, knowing that there's little to learn form a stab
of bad luck. Recently, after Chris Ferguson busted from
a tournament early on, he was asked about the hand that
put him on the rail. "Bad beat," was all he said. He
didn't feel the need to offer any more detail.
If you avoid talking about luck and concentrate on
the hands where there is something to be learned, your
game is bound to improve. Emulate the pros by finding
the will to say, "Boy, did I mess that one up."
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