I have some good news. Becoming a winning poker player is easy.

The process involves considerable study, practice, self-discipline, and the ability to assess realistically one’s emotional and intellectual strengths, but fundamentally it’s easy. There is a vast repository of high-quality poker information in books, magazines, forums and training sites. With an eighth-grade understanding of arithmetic and sufficient dedication, anyone can beat the game.

And yet most poker players are long-term losers.

This has to be the case, of course. The open faucet of rake constantly drips money from the game. Combined with the higher relative rake at lower limits and the larger number of lower limit games that are spread, the net result is more losers than winners.

So why are some players winners and others losers? And why should you care?

You may feel that your only concern is ensuring that you are a winning player, and since I’ve already told you that’s easy, your fundamental problem is solved. The losing players are simply the ones who do not put in the work. All you have to do is not be that guy.

But to me this misses a point that is both interesting in the abstract and, more importantly, one that provides an opportunity for making money.

I’ve claimed that beating the game is easy, but it’s not as easy as it was five years ago. This is of particular concern to those of us whose primary income is from poker. On a personal level I have a responsibility to myself and to my cats to follow all leads that can help my hourly rate. And one area that is underrepresented in the poker literature is the psychology of losing players.

The first thing to understand about losing players is that they must never read this article. In fact, in some cases it may not matter much. There are recreational players who understand that they could obtain better results if they worked at their game, but who choose not to. Some take a different slant and conclude, occasionally correctly, that they would win if they always played their best game, but they have more fun splashing about.

However, there are also players who delude themselves about if and why they lose, and it is in our interests that they continue doing so. Such players include those who believe online (and in some cases live) poker is rigged, that they are unlucky because the Universe hates them, or that nobody is making money because of the rake. They are close relatives of individuals who avoid keeping track of their wins and losses or who, when the outflow of money is impossible to ignore, come up with ingenious accounting schemes incorporating estimated tips to cocktail waitresses and dealers that show they are actually “about break even.”

Nobody likes losing. There is a connotation of failure and incompetence about it, not to mention the fact that it costs money. And as outlined above, different people take different approaches to making losing okay in the context of their personal psychological requirements, either by blaming external forces, by denying it is happening, or by regarding losses as an acceptable price for entertainment.

Your short-term mission is to ensure that such players at your table continue to be okay with losing. You would prefer that they continue their losing ways indefinitely.

If this sounds callous and exploitative, ask yourself why you are playing poker. Yes it is a beautiful, nuanced, entertaining intellectual challenge. But the single objective of the game is to win money. To miss opportunities to maximize profit makes as much sense as a chess player deciding not to checkmate an opponent so that the game can go on longer. This does not mean that you have to be an asshole at the table. Quite the reverse. As I’ll discuss below, you’ll usually catch more flies with honey than vinegar. But other than some rare situations, taking it easy on opponents is not only bad economics, it’s inconsistent with the purpose of poker.

One orthogonal point. You may find it odd that someone who writes poker articles and who coaches players would advocate the importance of encouraging losing players to continue to lose by maintaining their ignorance. Further, by putting these ideas in print it may appear I’m breaking my own advice. If the rest of my poker career was to be spent playing against the same pool of people, it would indeed be foolish of me to provide information that might help them improve their games. But in the real world the pool of opponents is fluid, and the health of the game and the potential for profit is best improved by increasing that player base. So while poker resources allow some of your opponents to become tougher, they also bring in new players and thus new money.

What does all this mean in practice?

Clearly a critical poker skill is identifying the strong and weak players at your table and handling them accordingly. My interest here is not on how one approaches a calling station or a maniac, but how in more general terms we can keep the losing players losing. Fundamentally this requires us to reinforce (or, more commonly, to avoid disrupting) their own psychological rationalizations of why they lose.

Many authors have emphasized the fact that a game in which people are enjoying themselves tends to be more profitable than one in which people are serious or grumpy. This produces something of a dilemma in that using our full array of poker skills takes considerable concentration. Ideally, we would like to avoid giving the impression that we are carefully analyzing every situation, or that we are doing anything other than engaging in playful entertainment.

Fortunately, you don’t need to be cracking jokes during every hand, particularly if you are by nature quiet at the table. What you do need to do is to smile and say “nice hand” to the little old lady in the nine seat when she runners some incomprehensible draw and steals your pot. She probably comes under the category of a losing player who regards her losses as the price of entertainment and the last thing she wants is someone snarling at her.

The only player type who might lead me to deviate from this general principle is one who is clearly playing worse the more beats he takes, and even here there is a danger of tightening the table while profiting from the steamer. If the decision seems close I usually base it on how much fun it’s likely to produce for me. (The main purpose of poker is maximizing profit, but you’re supposed to enjoy yourself while doing it.)

An example of such a “tilt equity” play is when you chase a draw against a steamer when taking slightly the worst of it. The expectation value you give up on the hand is offset by the added equity you gain when you hit and your target goes ballistic. It’s particularly effective against players who take bad beats personally since they will now go out of their way to play pots against you. The tilt equity is increased if you cackle at them when you drag the pot. They are invariably losing players because of their lack of emotional discipline and typically fall under the category of “I’m unlucky because the Universe hates me and I’m playing against that idiot weirdo British guy with the cat collars on his wrist.”

Understand that certain players are virtually programmed to lose. There is a vast body of research in educational psychology and related disciplines that shows people overachieve when they feel they have a competitive edge and underachieve when they feel they are at a disadvantage. In terms of the player types outlined above, anyone who believes they lose because of external forces is setting themselves up to lose. The “online poker is rigged” crowd are particularly profitable opponents for this reason. Notice too that they are likely to remain donators indefinitely. If they are losing because of the rigged random number generator rather than their ineptitude, why would they try to improve their game?

Fundamentally, what you need to do is pay attention. It always amazes me how much useful information players give away about themselves through conversation at the table. And even when they don’t you should at least be able to pick up on their general mood.

I was playing in the late tournament at Caesar’s Palace a few years ago when, much to my annoyance, I got a table draw with an aggressive young guy on my immediate left. Based on the way he handled his chips and cards it was clear that he spent plenty of time at the felt. However, it was also apparent that he was not in a good mood. His pre-flop folds were frequently accompanied by sighs and the cards getting hurled aggressively into the muck. Then he lost a pot to a woman who hit a legitimate draw.

This immediately produced increased sighing, eye-rolling, mumbling, and finally the audible comment “I hate playing against women, they always suck out on me.”

Since the comment seemed mostly directed towards me, I sympathized. And made a note to myself that this guy was doomed. Because the Ladies WSOP event had started that day and half our table was made up of women who had been eliminated from it. From my perspective this meant that I could simply avoid this guy and wait until he busted. Which he did thirty minutes later overplaying AK against the same woman who set him off initially.

Like everything in poker, it takes some practice to identify the player types I’ve discussed above and to develop strategies to maximize your profits from them. While you’re gaining that experience, be sure to follow one golden rule: Fish provide your profit, but can be easily startled into playing better if they are berated for their bad play. Do not tap the aquarium.

by Kat Martin

Kat Martin is a poker player and coach who is currently deciding whether he should move to Vegas or London. His musings on poker and a host of other topics can be found at http://feline9ine.blogspot.com/