I was just watching a game, and it got me thinking. One coach got somewhat bad dice, while the other one had good dice. Pretty normal in a BB game. But the coach with the bad luck was whining, complaining and finally insulting the other one. It is pretty obvious that he got frustrated and angry.

I have been playing poker for years, and worked as a poker coach for some time now. And the more I think of it, the more I see resemblance between poker and BB.

In poker we have this thing called tilt. And usually it comes when you get angry because someone is super lucky and/or you are pretty unlucky. Like if I put a lot of money in to the pot, and I have 97% change of winning the huge pile of money, and opponent get's that one card that saves him, it feels wrong. I might feel that I got robbed, and I get angry. And when I am on tilt, I make decisions based on my feelings (negative ones) rather than logic. And in poker, if you want to make profit in the long run, all your decisions should be based on logic, propabilities and equities.

I think that in BB you should play just like in poker. Always think "what are the odds for this to be succesfull?" and then compare the risk to the possible reward. Is it worth it? Good coaches understand the risks and rewards, and then priorize the actions. They try to minize the risks.

To some of you, all of that is pretty clear. But for some, it is too complicated. When you watch great coaches play, they think a lot. They don't do anything without some logic and reasoning behind it. Every move, every block, every whatelse has a reason. For bad coaches, they just do what feels fun. They don't think about positioning, and usually they don't have a clear plan on what they are trying to achieve in the field.

Now that we got the basics done, it's time to go to the real subject. Luck.

In poker, we usually use the term variance. Most serious poker players understand that even if you are a huge favorite, you will sometimes lose. 95% odds are not 100%. So even if you have 95% odds to win, you will lose 1/20 times. Sometime you might even lose 3 of those in a row, and sometimes win 70 of them in a row. Sure, it sucks to lose when you are a favorite, but the key thing is this:

You can't control it!

This is the most important part in tilt prevention. Use your energy and resources to things you can control. And the rest is just variance. I am not going to talk more about poker, let's put this thing in to BB.

What you can control in a BB game? Pretty much you can choose your actions. Move, block, pass, foul etc. You can't control your opponent's actions, although you can affect them with your own. So put your mind in to those.

As long as we are using rng for dice rolls, you can't affect them. You can't do anything about the outcome of a single dice. What you can do, is to make your odds a little better with your actions. As 1db is going to fail a lot often than 3db, you can increase your propabilities with your actions. But no matter what you do, you will fail every now and then. And there is nothing you can do about it!

Now this is pretty clear to some of you, but the hard part is to accept it. Why would you get angry on something that you can't control? Does it help your future rolls? I know it's not an easy thing to just accept the dice raping. I've done a lot of work with my poker mindset. I was away from FUMBBL for 2,5 years. In that time, I got a lot better in poker. Due to that, I am also a lot better coach in BB. Not necessarily in strategial point of view, but in general. I understand that I can't affect the dice rolls. So if my pixels fail horribly, the only thing I can do is to try play better. About 3 years ago I got really upset when I had a bad luck. Even angry. And I envied those who could just laugh when their Legend died with snakies or double skulls. I couldn't. But now I can. So can you.

Another thing about luck is that human mind works in a way that it remembers the bad things a lot stronger than the good ones. If you roll triple skulls, you will remember it for some time. Do you remember when you rolled triple pow last time? Thought so. If you roll snakies in a game, you will notice it. And you might even remember it after the game. "I could have won if I wouldn't have rolled those snakies in the last turn". Now rolling snakies is a propable as making about 8 or 9 3+ rolls. If you manage to make 9 consecutive dodges with AG3, do you feel lucky? Do you even notice it, or is it just "things going like they should?".

And as negative things appear stronger in our brains than positive ones, it's a downward spiral to unhappiness. Unless you can/learn to enjoy the positive ones. When you make lucky rolls (e.g. don't fail) but you can't enjoy them (you are just thinking that it went as it should have), you will find that playing BB gives you more negative moments than positive. And that is not the purpose of this game.

So, Kyyberi's triple steps to BB greatness:

1) Understand the propabilities, variance, and accept it.
2) Learn to enjoy when you succeed on something.
3) Focus your mind and thinking to the things you can affect and control.
Bonus) It's a game, have fun!