When Do I Know I’m Awesome?

Fantastic article. Echoes a lot of things I have thought to myself, but never seen in print, in particular the part about poker being a lonely game. My interest in the game started through a friendly home game, but I was one of the only players who had enough interest in the game to actually read books and *think* about the game. I can’t really discuss anything beyond the most basic strategy with them because they either don’t understand or care, or they think they already know how to play “optimal” poker.

I don’t really post to forums much because I see so many posts from people pretending to be better than they are–and it can be hard to separate the truly good players from the ones who only think they are, unless you’re one of the truly good players (which I’m not, but aspire to be)…

The part about knowing when you can move up when you can win or lose and not care–I’ve never seen it put that way, but that also makes a lot of sense intuitively.

And finally, I couldn’t agree more when you say that the best players are humble. I have seen so many examples of players who think they know it all–but precisely because of that they never improve their game, because naturally, when they lose, it’s because of other people’s bad play (“I can’t believe you called me with that!”). I like to say poker is one of the few games where almost everybody thinks they’re better than they actually are.

This always has been one of my favorites. I read it pretty regularly.

Thanks for this post. I can say that this is very timely. I read, post, play, blog, win, lose, lose, learn, adjust, win, read, study, lose, learn. My satisfaction comes from knowing I am playing my best. My best, however, can be improved on, so I read, play, learn, win, lose, blog and grow.

This is one of my favorites too. It applies not just to poker but also to a lot of other things in life.

Indeed, this post nails many things down with utmost precision and clarity.

And I wholeheartedly agree that this attitude towards poker is required to really master any other craft or skill too. The very best in any area are always looking for ways to improve (ie. looking at what they still don’t know how to do properly.)

[...] talks about the eternal questions for poker players; How good am I? When should I move up? I pretty much knew where he was heading with his answer ’cause I remember elsewhere he [...]

[...] Miller was the only to come up with a reply to the two hands I was asking for help to sort out: “Is anyone out there?” (Echos.) “Am I [...]

This is a very very good post, I reread it multiple times, prolly going to come back to this article when I am in a major downsing next time

Love this article! It rings true about poker players who think they’re bulletproof and a few months later they’re broke. I’ve always been a humble player and never criticized people for their bad play. I’ve recently been moving away from poker because of lack of free time in my life but I know I’m a good player. I’m always playing poker… If not at this moment I’m always playing in my head.

Wow, that was helpful to gain perspective on the downswing I am in curretnly. Love the game and won’t quit, will just “lick my wounds” and try to learn and improve.

This is without question one of your best CP articles, and I have read every one of them since 2007. Thanks for the insight.

This is a great article. I’d have to say personally that my first step to actually facilitate the evolution of my game(after a long period of stagnation and foolish losses) was taking a good, long hard look at myself and realizing how good I WASN’T. My problem was that I actually experienced a fair degree of MTT success when I first started playing and I just really took the cash for granted and pretty much blew it all, be it in cash games that I wasn’t rolled for or more MTTs that also were over my head. You gotta want to be better every day and keep learning, that’s for sure.

That was an excellent article. I have several poker sayings that I created posted on my wall above my computer monitor. One of them says,
“What’s important is not winning or losing, economic gain or loss, bad beats given or received, or mistakes made by myself or others. What’s important is the ongoing process of learing.”
Your article related to that very well.

Yea, man. Right on. That’s the way it really is. I lost $5700 last year playing in small buy in tournaments and in case anyone has any doubts check out my website.
It’s feast or famine in the tournament poker world, mostly famine.
I enjoyed your article. Keep up the good work.

this is my e mail and website in case anyone wants to check out my tournament record. Laugh out loud. Nothing really serious to check out yet. The good thing is I only lost $5750 last year.
e mail notiltbob@gmail.com
blog spadejackson.wordpress.com

[...] este del blog de Ed Miller (autor de varios de los mejores libros jamás escritos sobre NLH), http://www.notedpokerauthority.com/articles/when-do-i-know-im-awesome-2.html, se dan consejos realmente interesantes, como en muchos de sus artículos. Por [...]