Measuring Success

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Poker is a peculiar game. There’s no score. If you’re playing a cash game, there’s no winner. If you’re playing a tournament, there’s one winner and a zillion losers. Your opponents can play terribly and win a bundle. You can play great and crash and burn. All of this peculiarity has left more than one player completely frustrated, grovelling to the poker gods for a break. Clearly, if you’ve been reduced to begging for better luck, you probably haven’t succeeded. But what is success at poker?

This article is my attempt to convey what success means to me, personally, as a poker player.

First, I’ll tell you what it isn’t. It isn’t a winrate. If you poke around on the internet, you’re bound to find dozens of people who will gladly tell you that if you don’t win $20 on average for every 100 hands you play at game X, then you must suck. Or they’ll tell you that they win $20 for every 100 hands, but they don’t expect a lowly mortal such as yourself to win that much, so maybe you should win $10 for every 100 hands. Or you suck.

Please ignore all of these people. Most of them are full of it. They don’t win nearly as much as they say they do. In fact, you should take it for granted that any poker player telling you how much money they make is bending the truth at least a little bit. Most bend a lot. Don’t compare your real results to someone else’s fantasy. You can’t possibly live up.

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