Ah, the steam. If a poker gambler claims at no time to have peered over the shadow of a looming steam – they’re either telling a lie or they haven’t been betting for a long time. This does not imply of course that everyone has gone on steam before, some players have wonderful control and carry their losses as a loss and keep it at that. To be a powerful poker player, it is absolutely crucial to treat your wins and your losses in the same manner – with no emotion. You participate in the game in the same manner you did following a difficult loss as you would after winning a huge hand. Many of the poker masters are not attracted by tilting following a bad loss as they are incredibly accomplished and you should be to.
You must be certain that you can not win each hand you’re in, even if you are strongly favored. Hands that usually cause players to go on tilt are hands you were the leading choice or at least thought you were until you were hit and you lost a huge portion of your stack. Bad losses are bound to develop. Embrace that reality right now, I’ll say it once again – if your siblings play cards, if your father enjoys cards, if your grandparents enjoy cards – They have all had poor losses sometime. It is an inevitable effect of competing in Texas Hold’em, or really any kind of poker.
Since we are assumingly (nearly all of us) playing poker for a single purpose – to acquire a profit, it would make sense that we would gamble appropriately to maximize our profit potential. Now let us say you are up one hundred dollars off of a $100 deposit, and you take a huge blow in a NL game and your bankroll is only has remaining one hundred and twenty dollars. You’ve lost eighty dollars in a round where you should have picked up $200two hundred dollars when you went all-in on the flop and enjoyed a ten to one advantage. And that fiend! He sucked you out on the river? – Well hold it right there. This is a quintessential opportunity for a fresh player to begin tilting. They just burned too much $$$$ on one hand that they should have won and they’re pissed
