All your life you eat candies/chips, drink coffee, or, for example, smoke, but one day you suddenly find out or a new study is done and it turns out that nicotine is a big poison that harms us and the environment, coffee contains many carcinogens, and that candies and chips are not suitable food for us. Since you are aware, you easily give up what you don't need and feel no discomfort, you react flexibly to circumstances and continue living.
The same situation applies to poker, you learn to play poker, you learn hand values and combinations. You find out that AK and AA are “monsters” and that losing with AK is already a bad beat. In short, you slowly improve, learn, and practice, post your hands in poker forums and so on. But one day you get advice and explanations from good players that opening with AJ or KQ from UTG (full ring) is unprofitable, they criticize your AK c-bets and say that you shouldn't c-bet 100% of flops, that you shouldn't stack off with AsAh on a 7c8c9c flop with 3 opponents. Or simply that playing out of position is -EV. It all seems very simple, you learn, and easily adapt to new circumstances and conditions.
But is everything that simple? Both in life and in poker? (I often hear people say about smoking “I need to quit smoking”, “I know smoking is very harmful to me, but…”, “I know smoking is complete crap, but…” and similar things. And if you ask a person why do you smoke? What does smoking give you? Most often you won't hear a single answer. It helps to relax!? Ha, don't joke and don't lie to yourself, don't you know better ways to relax? 🙂
Let's go back to poker. A common saying both in life and in poker, “I know I shouldn't do this, but…” and then comes the “hero” move, call, or unconsciously shoving all in, which later makes you regret and blame yourself for not being able to control yourself.
So is it easy to change? Unfortunately, I have to disappoint most of you. Changing is very simple and easy. Don't give in to the old opinion that habits are hard to break and need to be overcome with willpower or physical effort, habits break in a minute, one after another, and often a lot of time passes before we consciously realize “I don't do that anymore” “I absolutely don't want to…” what an uplift it is inside then. Each of us has countless examples around us, or how a person with a “very strong habit” changed their life in a moment, for example: when a hardened smoker who smoked for 20 years quits smoking, how people change their eating or lifestyle habits in a day. How fears disappear in a second, you were afraid of spiders all your life, but once you realized how small they really are, you thought “how should a spider be afraid of me, screaming and running with a broom”. One thought and the habit that seemed you would never get rid of is gone.
A habit is in our heads, in our mind, we just need to let it go from there.
Colleagues, be aware, everything in life is simple.
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