Patience
If there is one quality a successful poker player must have, it is patience. Every book, every teacher will tell you this and yet no matter where you sit down to play poker; in any cardroom, any casino and particularly at every computer screen; you will be playing against other players with no patience. This should be considered a winning opportunity for you.
Watch for a player who has laid down five hands in a row or ten; watch the player who has not played a hand for half an hour. When they do come into a hand, they either have the goods because they also have patience or they have lost it and are playing a hand because they want some action. You be patience and also observe the patience level of your opponents.
It doesn’t matter if you get 54 followed by 72 followed by 83, the cards have no memory and regarding your starting hands neither should you. Each deal is a new hand and you must not react to this hand based on a run of non-playable cards in the last 10 or 20 hands.
Patience also means that you are aware of your chip stack and willing to lay down hands when the flop goes against you. We all know that the odds in poker will average out and when you play correctly you will be a long term winning player. But long term requires you to be patient when you are in the midst of a bad run of cards. Patience requires that you minimize your losses when the cards are not there. Sometimes winning is really about not losing or losing only the minimum.
“Patience is not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow - that is patience.”
-This is Beginner’s Poker Blog Post #11
