To win at poker, be a good loser.

I haven’t had a big win in poker for a long time.

While there are potentially various reasons for this, one of the main reasons I’ve only just come to realize and embrace is that I’m not a good loser.

How good I am at the game is debatable, but what I do know for certain is that I was spending considerable time off the felts “getting over” downswings, bad beats and repetitive mistakes.

You see, when you’re running good — it’s fairly easy to keep going, no matter what your skills. But when the running ain’t that good, well, that’s when your poker and life skills are really put to test.

A good student of the game, when faced with adversity, would simply course-correct by putting to use the knowledge he/she had gained over the years. I had clearly stopped being a student for I wasn’t learning from experience.

Somewhere it had become more of a challenge to prove to myself and others that “Not only can I play poker, but I can also be the best” rather than simply playing and enjoying the game for what it is — a game of smarts.

While the internet is filled with success stories of professional poker players that win big, what’s really missing is the stories of how good these winning players are at losing, how good they are at dealing with bad days, downswings, bouncing back after making mistakes or running into bad-beats.

How these winning players get right back up after falling, without tilting or having any emotional attachment to the who, what and why of misfortune, makes them good if not really good losers.

And so, while there’s an equal opportunity available to anyone who’s looking to learn and master the art of poker; to have an edge and be a winning player, your best bet is to start with being a good loser.

If you enjoyed reading this, you might want to also read my story (2015) on how I started playing poker, fell in love with the game and all the life lessons I learned along the way: ‘The thing about me, myself and poker’