Moving On From Hand To Hand …
Moving On In Life

We all make stupid mistakes. Some mistakes are small. We forget to set our alarm and over sleep. We spend too much time at the bar on Thursday and don't make it to work on Friday. We decide not to study for a test, and fail it. We say something we wish we could take back. We fold a 7, 2 and three sevens come up on the flop. Some mistakes are larger. We cheat on a boyfriend. We drink and drive. We forget our one year anniversary. We go all in on a bluff and the other guy calls.

I'm sure as you just read this, you nodded your head in agreement and realized that you did that once, or you knew someone who did. What I want to teach you in this article is how to learn from these mistakes and move on.

Sometimes it seems as if our bodies are programmed to regret. We spend too many hours wondering if we did the right thing, made the right move, could have done more, and should have said something else. We replay scenes in our head wondering how they would have turned out differently if we just hadn't done that. Even sleep is no safe haven. Our mistakes and regrets can follow us into our dreams and send us tossing and turning all night long.

While it's not always pleasant, these regrets are something we get used to. We learn to live with them and it almost becomes part of our daily routine to rewrite a scene from the day in our heads. In every day life, it's OK to mull over a situation, but at the poker table we need to know how to accept what happened, push it aside and move on.

We've all folded a hand we regret folding. The particular hand that haunts me is the one that I mentioned earlier. I had a 7d, 2c and naturally folded them. Rather than discarding the hand physically as well as mentally and watching the rest of the game play on without me, I did what most poker players do and watched the flop to see if my discarded hand would become a mistake. I watched three 7s magically appear on the flop. There was nothing I could do to stop my jaw from dropping. If only I had called the blind. If only I had stayed in just for the flop. If only I hadn't folded the worst possible hand just this once! The game continued and I watched as the winning hand (a measly pair of fives) received a fairly large pot. I sighed to myself and rolled my eyes - I would never look at a 7, 2 the same way again.

From that game on, I would think twice about those two cards that I normally would have discarded immediately. In fact, no starting hand was too bad for me anymore. So what if I have a 3, 9 unsuited. What if three nines appeared on the flop!!

I allowed this one hand, this 7-2 off that would have become quad 7s, to haunt me so long that it really began to affect my play. Other players would look at me as if I was crazy when I turned over my terrible hand that I had called to the river with in the hope that maybe this time I would hit my miracle hand.

As you know, I like to relate my articles to life. I feel that it makes them easier to understand to people who don't play poker all that much. And I also feel it extends the lessons I try to teach. When I was pretty young, I entered into my first serious romantic relationship. I had had boyfriends before him but none were as mentally, physically and emotionally mature. When my first serious love and I first started "going out" I allowed myself to open my heart to him and trust him completely. The relationship went well for a fairly long amount of time until I found out he had been cheating on me and lying to me for the majority of our relationship. We had been together for about two and a half years before I found out the entire truth. I was hurt and devastated. I had trusted this boy, told him things I never thought I'd tell anyone and loved him completely only to find out that he had been cheating and lying.

After that relationship I entered into a series of meaningless relationships. I didn't trust anyone I met and refused to open up to any guy, no matter how I felt about him. These meaningless relationships lasted from the time we broke up until halfway through my freshman year of college.

My meaningless relationships ended at about the same time as my bad poker playing ended. Coincidence? Maybe. I was sitting at the poker table and was dealt the same exact hand that I had folded so many games ago. I bent the edges of my cards up from the table and a 7d, 2c stared back at me � and I swear they were winking at me!

As the other players called or folded I did what I usually did when these two cards came up. I began to get nervous. I thought about the game in which I had folded them and should have stayed in. I thought about the few possibilities of winning hands I could come up with. My eyes darted from player to player, wondering if they went through this same dilemma. "Of course not!" I thought to myself. "These are terrible cards! The MOST terrible cards a poker player could every possibly have in his or her possession!!" What was I doing, stressing over these bad cards? Of course I should fold.

It was my turn to call and I did what I should have done a long time ago and folded. I had spent so many games, so many different hands debating whether or not to fold them. I had pushed aside my poker judgment, which knew the difference between good cards and bad cards, just because of one hand that hadn't turned out well.

Folding those cards was one of the most liberating things I could have done. From then on, I played poker the way it should be played -solid poker as my dad likes to call it.

I mentioned that my meaningless relationships ended at about this time as well. Much as I had an epiphany at the poker table, I had an epiphany about relationships too. I realized that not all guys are going to cheat and going to lie. Just because I met one bad apple, didn't mean that there wasn't another guy that I could learn to trust. I couldn't allow this one boy to ruin the future of my relationships, just as I couldn't allow my one bad hand to ruin the future of my poker playing.

Like I said earlier, we need to learn how to get over things. We can't hold on to events or emotions so tightly and allow them to direct our lives or else we'll live in fear of EVERYTHING. Bad things happen everyday. That's not going to change. What can change is how we react to these bad things and let ourselves learn from them without letting them ruin our lives.

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