We all learned from watching The Matrix that we could achieve wondrous things if only we could free our minds. Our preconceived notions limit our thoughts.
The same is very true when it comes to poker and other things statistical. It turns out that we humans are badly wired for understanding random things. We are wired to detect patterns, and we tend to find patterns even if there are none.
This makes perfect survival sense because things in our world aren't actually random (on the local scale.) If there are footprint-shaped patches in the mud, they are almost certainly footprints. If there are leaves dancing across your yard in one direction, there is almost certainly a breeze blowing that way. If a vase falls off a table to the left, it was probably pushed from the right.
If you flip a coin and get heads three times, our mental wiring screams at us that it means something about what will happen next. . . but it doesn't.
Break free
One of the most maddening things about community card games like Texas Hold'em is that we can see what we would have had if we stayed in. Or at least, that's true in real life. In online poker, that's not true.
Many people reading this will be shocked. . . after all, in real-world poker, once the cards are shuffled, the order is not going to change. Whether you fold or stay, the next cards will be the next cards. But online, that is not true. They are not shuffled at all. Instead, every time a cards is necessary, one is chosen at random from the available cards. Let me say that again: the next card is not even decided until it's necessary.
This is done to ensure that the cards are random and unpredictable to players. You see, which card will be randomly picked is a function of many timing delays, including the time it takes players to make their decisions. So if you fold, you are no longer a timing factor. The cards that come later are not the same ones that would have come if you had stayed in, and continued to affect the play of the hand. For more technical details on how it works, see RandomNumberGenerator.
The upshot is that once you fold, you will never know what "would have" happened if you stayed in. The converse is true, too. . . when you stay in, it's not a given that a particular will come or not. You can't conclude that you should not have called with your four-flush just because it didnt' come in; if you folded, it might have! Every player involved is affecting the timing and therefore the outcome. You can't say what would have happened if you acted differently, because your different action would change what happened. . . and it's almost certainly for the best. Why?
It doesn't matter what came next
It really doesn't. You can't decide whether you were right or wrong based on whether you caught your flush, or whether the river ace came to kill your top pair. What matters is whether you played it right at the time you made your decision. This is critical to understand if you want to become a better poker player.
If you want to know if you're calling too often on draws, do not look at whether your draws hit or not. If you had acted differently, the results would have been different! The fact is that you should not look at the results, but at the odds you were getting when you actually called. If the pot odds were high enough to call your straight, you were correct to call. If they were not, then you were not correct. That's true whether or not your straight hits.
When you look back at the hand, you also know what your opponents held. You can use this information to help decide whether you were correct to call. Let's say you had called two cold with an open-ended straight draw; you thought you had odds. Now, instead, you see that one player had two pair, and another had a four-flush. Looking at the bets and raises, you should have realized that these hands were likely. You thought you had odds to call two cold, but making your straight could also make the flush, and even if you made, you were vulnerable to the two pair drawing up to a full house. In retrospect, you didn't have odds.
That's the kind of analysis you should be doing when you review your hands. It shouldn't matter to you that the two pair didn't improve, and that the flush didn't hit, and that your straight came in to win the river. What matters is that you weren't as live as you thought, and you might have known better from the action. Thinking like this will improve your play next time.
Better than real life
It's hard to get away from the fact that the river came the way it did. It's especially difficult in real life poker, because it is a fact that the river card would have been the same no matter what you did. Online, you are freed from that gruesome and distracting fact. The slightest change in the play of the bets will necessarily change what river card came, and you have no choice but to evaluate your play the proper way: not by whether or not you would have won, but by what your chances of winning were.
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