Who Makes it Through the Long Haul?

I have been giving this one a lot of thought lately...about how unnatural of a career choice it is to play poker for a living.  I have said many times before that winning at the game is easy- it is managing everything else that is difficult.  Now I am not so sure.  Don't get the wrong impression.  I am not saying this because I have been losing or because I am running bad.  In fact, I am writing this because of what I had to do to avoid both of these things.

I made a post a few months ago that was very well received on the subject of "not fighting the last battle."  In other words, you can't just focus on what play worked yesterday or even on what works most of the time.  You have to remain flexible to deal with many different player types in an ever-changing game. While I am no psychologist, I would have to say that fighting the last battle is a very natural human tendency.  The tendency to become rigid in your actions and your education not only provides comfort, it is also quite practical.  Just for a second imagine how different your life would be if you were forced to constantly rethink how to perform simple, repetitive tasks like driving, just to avoid crashing.  The world would be a frightening place, indeed.  Though no one would disagree that poker is quite a different animal from driving, few people openly acknowledge that at least 85% of the game is completely repetitive.  You fold 92o under the gun, you re-raise your aces, you fold your JTo to a 3-bet...you get the idea.  Doing these things correctly the majority of the time is where most of your profit will come from.  But it's that other 15% that can break you.  And therein lies the problem.

Back to the issue of psychology.  Since a strong majority of what you will encounter in poker is repetitive, it is very straining on your cognitive processes not to fall victim to the feedback loop.  Remaining flexible to the challenges of poker requires not only a consistent effort on your part, it requires that you constantly wage war against your basic human urges.  Your brain is always trying to put the answers to those challenges in a box.  It wants to format them, label them, repeat them, and file them away for later use.  It wants answers, not new, creative ways to deal with those challenges.  They say that you can not teach an old dog new tricks.  Your mind WANTS to be that old dog.  

Oddly enough, this is not a problem for the losing player.  The losing player is always searching for the answer to that problem, because his mind knows that he must change something in order to attain his goal.  This is actually a problem for the player who has been winning for long stretches.  It is far too easy to fall into the trap of believing that you have found a winning formula for this game when that happens.  The way to beat this type of thinking lies in maintaining the strange contradiction of learning the lessons of your last session, yet making the conscious effort to forget everything that happened.  Is this difficult?  Absolutely, but it is the only way that you can make it through the long haul.