The Fatal Flaw of Indecision

Author: Simon Dexter

Hi guys,

Do you know, I’ve had a guts-full of poker instruction manuals, online tutorials and the rest. No matter how much of this stuff I take in, whenever I’m playing I continually find myself thinking “this guy is bluffing” and then folding or else I think “my opponent is weak” but then fail to raise.

You see, indecision is my fatal flaw. I almost didn’t write this email…

I don’t want to be indecisive any longer; if I think a guy is weak, I want to raise him, to act upon what my gut feeling (or should that be my reading?) actually is. However, having absorbed as many instructional texts as one man can take, is there anything else I could do?

Indecisively yours
TM
Maidstone

TM,

Granted, some of the books, dvds and online tutorial designed to teach people about very specific areas of the game cannot tell them how to react in every instance. Furthermore, once you’ve read a handful of instructional tomes, starting another can be tough going.

Here’s what you should do – read Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
The Danish prince was the epitome of indecision and poker players can learn much from his mistakes as well as appreciate Shakespeare of course. If you don’t know the story, suffice to say Hamlet was a man engulfed with guilt, one who suffered incredible emotional conflicts due entirely to his inaction and slow decision-making.
Hamlet is aware that Claudius, his uncle, has murdered his father, yet he’s slow to avenge the killing. By accident, he ends up killing Polonius, father of his girlfriend Ophelia, who drowns herself in a act of suicide. This unfortunate series of events lead to perhaps Shakespeare’s most brutal finale where inactivity and tardy decision making are identified as Hamlet’s inherent personality flaws.
Read it as classical literature, but consider too the lessons a poker player could learn from Shakespeare’s underlying themes. It makes a change from How to make a zillion playing poker.

Tags: Online Poker, poker, Poker Strategy, Poker Tips

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 11:17 am and is filed under Have Your Say!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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