I've been experiencing something peculiar in my limit games recently. I know it's not tilt but it almost feels like I'm afraid to play. I lost my entire bankroll again in a landslide failure I've never experienced before. But it helped me finally figure it out. What I've been experiencing lately, and what I'm sure everybody has been through, is the Fear of Not Winning.

There is a difference between being afraid to lose and being afraid to not win. Losing is a natural part of gambling. Just like yin and yang (a positive and a negative), winning can't exist without losing, and vice versa. Being afraid to lose is simply a refusal to accept this universal fact. Being afraid to not win lies somewhere above this. You know that loss comes with gain, but you're afraid you'll lose everything before you can gain anything....

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1) We tilt very easily - As beginners, we have the tendency to tilt ourselves at every opportunity. It often doesn't even matter if we're winning or losing. If things aren't going exactly how we want them to, our focus quickly decreases -- and our profit goes with it.

2) We hope for too much - Why do we hope to get lucky to win instead of playing profitably? Why do we make blind calls every round hoping that we'll spike a pair? And why do we beat ourselves up after we lose money to these foolish decisions? I can't hope to know the answers myself, but I do know that hoping too much tends to lower our profit.

3) We don't see what's profitable - We don't see what the best choices are when...

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I've launched my new blog, or rather, I've simply shifted from Holdem-Journal to FocusPoker. I'm very excited in starting this new blog and I believe it will be very helpful to myself as well as others in the online poker community. If you're a beginner to Holdem who feels lost and wants to improve, this is a blog worth checking out.

This is a blog about a 19 year-old beginning poker player and his journey toward the path to poker profit. The general purposes for this blog are:

* To Share my own experiences to help other beginning players like me
* To Track my progress and profit as I learn to play hold'em
* To Connect with other players and share...

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Hey guys, I've been writing these Beginner's Tips on my other blog, and I thought I'd share them here as well. Mind you, I'm a beginner myself, and these are some of the things I've learned while playing online Holdem. Hopefully they'll help!

For more beginner's resources, visit my blog! Follow me on my one-and-a-half year challenge to become a poker pro!

* Tip #1: The trick in being successful in Poker is not just about winning. More importantly, it's about not losing.

Here's the thing -- sometimes I could win a gigantic pot of money and get really excited. But then after 30 more minutes of playing, somehow I'd find myself barely breaking even again. I'm definitely not the first person to experience...

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The rest of camp went totally awesome, easily the best summer I've had working for them. I also managed, through a camp connection, to finagle myself a real actual factual legitimate normal job. How exciting. Only took me 4 years out of college to finally land a normal job! Recession nothing bitches. 8th grade TA with special ed and special needs kids, plus a one on one math class with an advanced 7th grade student. Pay isn't great, but it's a start and if I do well it goes up every year nicely, plus I'm going to hopefully get involved in some coaching, possibly in all three seasons, though I never did sports in the winter because basketball is the devil, I didn't get into hockey until I was too old, and I didn't run track even though I could've because I run super fast! Football and baseball are the two big ones. I likes them.

In poker news, dicked around a little over the past month with exactly nothing to show for it, mostly because I did silly things like try to shortstack...

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