Over the years I’ve encountered and befriended a number of inexperienced poker players. Many of these amateur players run businesses, have full-time jobs, or are aspiring players who have just found the game of poker.

Whether they’re a struggling professional player or just an avid amateur player, I’ve noticed a common flaw in these players’ processes. Below, I want to talk about the most difficult challenge these players face when beginning their poker journey and how to overcome it. 

Assessing Play and Losses

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome when playing and improving at poker is separating the results from the process. In poker, you can analyze a situation correctly, make the perfect play, and still go home empty-handed.

Professional players often preach this idea of not being “results-oriented.” That is, there are certain situations in poker where we are just going to lose all our money, and there’s nothing we can do about it. 

Coming to terms with this notion can be a challenging concept for inexperienced players. However, being able to assess your play and differentiate between situations where you got unlucky and situations where you are making simple new poker player mistakes is one of the strongest tools to improve your game.  

Losing Poker Hands Is Inevitable

The idea that losing a big hand of poker means you did something wrong is a natural thought.

Facing a cooler deep in a tournament, or getting a big bluff picked on the river is a visceral experience and it’s only human that our mind will presume we should have made a different action – that we would not have lost if we had been able to find the fold or hold off the bluff. Feedback loops like this are inherent in many areas of life where we are incentivized to take actions that let us “win” again in the future.

Don’t Get Hung Up On Minor Details

With poker, the luck element combined with card distribution can make breaking out of this false feedback loop quite difficult. An inexperienced player will frequently be hung up on the strategy of their big bust-out hand while missing the errors they made in other hands, especially ones that they won.

To find true improvement, we need to focus more on the process than the results. Instead of dwelling on whether or not we could have folded pocket kings preflop (because the other player had aces this time), we could be assessing and improving other areas of our game. If you’re finding yourself frequently falling into this trap, a good question to ask yourself is ‘would we even be thinking about this hand if we had won?’

If the opponent had pocket queens instead of pocket aces versus or kings, and we had doubled up, would we even be giving a second thought to our play?  The importance of making these distinctions and assessing ranges and situations is a vital step for beginner poker players to begin improving. 

Practice and Experience Are Key

Experience is a player’s greatest ally in this war against being results-oriented. As we see more hands, showdowns, and situations, we become accustomed to the ranges of hands that are “supposed” to get the money in versus each other. The situations will reveal themselves the more you play, and you will inevitably learn from them.

Top professional players are quite at peace with the idea of a “good” poker game bluff that didn’t work and lost all the chips, or a “bad” call that happened to win the pot. For players that play less frequently this is always going to be a challenge. However, if a player can understand the framework of this concept and the idea that a bad result in a poker hand does not necessarily mean a bad decision, then the door to improvement is open.

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