ARE YOU A GOOD POKER PLAYER?
Compared to the astonishingly huge number of fish in online poker today, a surprisingly big percentage of online poker players would answer "yes" to the above question. It's weird how many people go around boasting they are excellent poker players. The truth is however, that people who say they're good, usually suck. Some say it's the easiest tell in poker: those who think they are, are not. What exactly does this over-estimation of one's poker skills mean?
Is it going to hurt the self-delusional player in any way? As a matter of fact, it can. It usually makes a huge difference in the way one plays, and it can differentiate small winners from "almost-but-not-quite" losers, great winners from mediocre ones. Sometimes, good poker players commit the mistake of recognizing how good they are and starting to play with that in mind. You need to know, however, that no matter how good a player you think you are, or really are, it doesn't mean a whole lot at the table. You see, in poker and online poker, the differences between good and mediocre or weak players are made by very little edges and factors hidden all over, factors which sometimes even good poker players themselves fail to identify and/or assess correctly.
Take the following example: we have a really good player who plays at a certain limit paying attention to all details, and he's very successful. So much so, that he suddenly decides he needs to take his game to another level to make even more money with the same amount of effort. He hits a much higher limit/stakes table, and he loses. He cannot explain to himself why it happens, he just doesn't get lucky at all, and seems to lose on marginal hands all the time. Before he can regroup and rethink his approach, he's out of the game. At a closer analysis, he realizes the simplicity of the problem: he wasn't adequately bankrolled. A very small detail, yet one that will have serious repercussions on one's play.
In poker there's quite a lot of variance involved. There are ups and downs all the time and while our guy might've been mentally well-prepared to handle them, his bankroll just wasn't on par with his poker abilities. Being used to playing at a lower limit, he was taken by surprise. This is how an apparently simple little aspect turned a good player into a weak one in the blink of an eye. Another such small aspect that can make the difference between good and weak, is rakeback. If you want to know whether a guy who boasts how good he is at poker can really put something where his mouth is, ask him if he plays with rakeback.
As we all know, a good poker player is a player who pays attention to every single detail. He won't leave anything unnoticed and as such, he should know about the edge poker rakeback can give him. One of the major hurdles online poker presents its players with, is the rake. The rake will set otherwise reasonable players back to being losers. Every poker player who knows what he's doing, plays with rakeback. That way, provided they play enough, breaking even is more than enough to be a winner. Does that mean that Joe who plays with rakeback and thus earns $3000/month is a better player than Jack who plays the same way, but without rakeback and breaks even? In technical terms, it probably doesn't. In reality though, it means that Joe was better at sniffing out an opportunity and putting it to use than Jack, which in my book, really makes him a better player.
The most common way a player gets to overrate himself is when he plays really well at his best. That does indeed give him a reason to consider himself good. That same player though, can be downright abysmal when a bad luck streak hits. Bottom line is: being good or bad is not really an issue in poker. Being a winner or a loser is. Remember that.
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