Malaise

Sometimes we as poker players get the sense that something about our game isn't quite right, but we can't put our finger on it. Although this is always true; our game is never perfect, this particular symptom of lacking confidence or insecurity causes mistakes. This feeling of malaise motivates us to change our strategy up for no particular reason other than trying to fix what's wrong in our game. It causes us to lose sight of the bigger picture of our poker strategy.

This concept applies to many different skills. I first noticed it working as a fundraiser, training some of the newer guys. The most important thing in any fundraising interaction is building a rapport with someone; making that personal connection with him or her. In addition to rapport building, there are many other techniques which come into play: the way you present the information, the way you ask for a donation, the way you make sure your contact is engaged with the conversation, etc. What would often happen when someone was going through a slump is that they would focus too much on the technique of the skill and not the art and intuition of it.

In poker the idea of what it takes to be a winning player is very abstract. People could have styles that are much different but achieve similar results. I would say the art and intuition of poker is finding edges over your opponents as well as preventing your opponents from having an edge over you. The techniques are 3-betting, value betting, semi-bluffing, check raising, etc. We can only focus on a certain number of things at a time. If we follow our intuition we naturally pick out the most important things and focus on those things; however, if we focus too much on particular strategies we might miss out on other more important factors.

What I recommend is to follow your planned poker strategy at the table and not to focus too much on particular techniques except for the sake of learning. Changes to your game that you want to make should be well thought out, and ideally consulted about with other good players. Being good at poker doesn't require doing one or two things perfectly, it requires doing a lot of different things proficiently. Take everything you know and put it together at the poker table even if you don't know as much as you would like to.