3 Types of Poker Players Who Almost Never Win (Main Character Syndrome)

I'm 40 and I've been coaching poker since I was 24. In those 16 years, I've watched hundreds of students come and

go. Some have made it, some haven't. And I have learned something very important that there are three types of poker

player who almost never make it. And what's even more scary is that most of you watching this are one of them.

There's probably about a 65 to 70% chance that you are one of these three types of poker player. And if you are,

my job here is not to persuade you to give up the game. Although that would be preferable to continuing down a hopeless

path, my job is to show you that you might need to make a giant perspective switch and to wake you up a bit if you

are one of these three. These three types of players that I have watched fail despite doing my very best, despite

having coaching and working hard, all share one fundamental trait in common, main character syndrome. That doesn't

make you selfish or a narcissist or anything like that. In a video game, it's okay to experience the world

through your own character's eyes and to see everything from your perspective. But when you do that in poker, it's

fatal. And these three players we're about to discuss all do it in one way or another. So, first off, why is main

character syndrome not a problem in a video game? Well, it's because everything happens through the lens of

your character. It's all about you. It's about your stats. It's about your weapon. It's about your fireball spell,

right? I'm talking about an RPG here, but you can apply this to any game, first person shooter, whatever it may

be. And that's normal. That's how you should experience those kind of video games. It would be weird to wonder about

the other characters and the places in the game that you're not currently visiting. That would be bizarre. But

because poker is this grand strategic web of ideas, right? That's why I call poker theory, right? All of these

concepts that affect EV and EV, by the way, affects your bottom line, your green line, how well you do over a

period of months or years, variance aside, that is caused by Eevee. And Eevee is a real concept. It's there with

you at the table when you're playing. It's a direct result of your cards, your opponent's range and strategies, and

what's going to happen if you take X action with Yand. That's what determines your Eevee. There's this new wave of

players right now who are getting into the game and they're seeing the word Eevee in a solver and they think it's

purely a theoretical thing. It's not. There's theoretical Eevee and then there's what I call, you guessed it,

ladies and gentlemen, true Eevee that resides at the table and it affects your hand, the two cards in front of you and

how you play them against your opponent's ranges and strategies. So with that in mind, one aspect of main

character syndrome and the first player type I want to warn you not to be today or urge you to not be any longer if you

already are this person is the my range guy or or girl. The my range person is someone who focuses much more on their

own range strategy, balance, avoiding overbluffing or underbluffing, bluff to value ratios, things like this. had a

video that came out very recently where I mentioned a student who didn't make it, who succumbed to all kinds of poker

pitfalls. And that student's major problem was they started the game obsessed about balance and ratios and

solver outputs and stuff like that. You can use the solver in a very good way by the way that has nothing to do with

memorizing bluff to value ratios or frequencies for hands. So the main character syndrome person in poker who

is obsessed with their own range is caring about something that does not directly have an effect on their real

game Eevee. Let me show you why your own range is basically a non- entity. It kind of doesn't exist for all intents

and purposes causally. Let's say you're on the river and you're considering bluffing and you're against a reggg in a

Zoom game fastold game at 50NL or something and you've played a few hands together but you don't really know each

other, right? You're on the river. Very common situation I've described there. It's a bet, check, bet opportunity.

You've bet the flop, turn check through. You've got the chance to bluff the river. You've got jack high. You don't

think your hand's worth much at showdown. If anything, you're considering bluffing.

But what's your range if you bluff? What's your range for bluffing? Well, you can just decide what it is in

this one moment. You could make your range for bluffing just this one combo you have here, or you could make it like

every air combo you land with. How you've played the turn, by the way, will affect that. But again, you had full

control over that. You could play it differently on one day to another day. Your mood could affect that. All kinds

of opaque factors can affect what your actual bluffing range is on the river. Villain strategy, how often they call

you with a certain hand that they have or how likely they are to call you with that hand. Usually that's a binary

thing. They're going to call you with that hand or they're not is based on what they think of the average player in

your situation's range. Right? The average reg's range. If you look like a rag, maybe maybe it's not based on

anything and they're just tilted or button clicking or zombieing their way through a session, right? You don't know

what it's based on. But one thing is for sure, it is not based on what your true bluffing range actually is in that

moment because they have zero access to that. And psychologically, nobody can make a decision due to a factor that

they have zero access to. That is impossible. Right? If I don't know what's in a box, I can't make a decision

based on what's in the box. So, they don't know what your actual range is. And therefore, in one real sense, it

doesn't matter what your actual range is. Your EV doesn't depend on that at all. Your EV from bluffing depends on

your fold equity in this one moment. Now, if you played 400 million hands against Linus Love, you'd get destroyed.

But aside from that, you would need to care about how often you were doing certain things, and you would have to

not project an exploitable face up strategy to your opponent who's better than you and is going to learn what it

is and is going to beat you. That's why a solver really cares about balance. It's still not primary, by the way. In a

solver, Eevee comes first. But a solver cares about balance because its opponent has full 2020 vision as to its strategy.

This is not the case in this spot I've described. So, should you bluff the river? That depends on how often the

player type you're up against is folding over massive samples. We have data courses in this in golden carrot, right?

Data is a thing. Also, common sense is a thing. Human psychology is a thing. And theory is a thing as well, right? What's

the range they start with? How strong is it? How natural is it to call the river with? And how likely are they to want to

fold to certain bet sizes? And how much fold equity will certain bet sizes garner on average? That's what affects

your EV in this spot. But the my range guy is obsessed with bluff to value ratios. I don't want to bet jack high

because then I might be overluffing. It has nothing to do with your EV. I think my bluffs here are these hands and my

value bets are these hands. And I'm going to roll to see if I bluff. Almost certainly terrible at low stakes where

spots are just basically overfolded or underfolded. You need to just learn which is which. Right. We That's what we

do at Carrot Corner. We partly teach exploits for that reason. It's highly unlikely that the EV bluffing that river

is exactly zero like it is in the solver with that bluff that has average blockers at a spot that's not overfolded

blah blah blah. You get the gist. So to summarize this, it's conceptually important to understand what the buttons

range generally looks like in theory in that spot that you're in that bet check bet opportunity. It's important to

understand in theory that if that river card is good for you or that turn card was good for you by the way as well,

then you may have an automatic bluff in theory cuz your fold equity is supposed to be higher. And if it's not, then you

don't. And it's going to be more about your blockers in theory. But your own actual range has nothing to

do with it. What the big blind thinks a button range might look like there and how it might behave has something to do

with it, but it's not clear how much. But your true range is not a thing because it is basically changeable based

on whatever thought you happen to have in that moment. So, if you feel like you don't want to bluff there, your range

for bluffing is nothing because that feeling that you don't want to bluff is going to take over and you're not going

to bluff any of the bluffs. And now you're completely unbalanced. And if you feel like you need to win the pot, that

you're desperate to win that pot and you're always bluffing every combo, then you're over bluffing, right? Maybe

depending on the range you've landed with and what the board is. But what's for sure is that that actual range is

nothing like the balanced idea that you have of it in your head or that you saw in the solver. And even if it was, it

wouldn't do anything for you. So yes, I stand by my original assertion in that past video, that recent video that it

isn't about learning bluff to value ratios and balance and and playing your range. You shouldn't play your range in

poker. You should understand how your range is meant to sort of look in that node and how you might want to change it

to improve your EV. But ultimately, your hand is the only thing that's in control of your EV against your opponent's range

and strategy, not how you would play the other hands in that very moment. I hope that makes sense. Right? So, I'm not

saying that people who study G with GTO or use solvers or care about poker theory, all these things are a bit

different, by the way, but bear with me. I'm not saying that those things are inherently always bad, but when they are

accompanied by the pitfall goal of trying to emulate balance and bluff to value ratios and thinking that your

range is something you need to be playing in the moment, I'm afraid you're succumbing to a kind of midw

misunderstanding about poker. Midwit, by the way, refers to the meme, right, where like the guy at the the base level

of that skill has just started who has no eyes as depicted in the midw meme, right? Never has any eyes because

they're very, very bad at the thing. They can't even see what's in front of them. They're not going to play their

range. They're not going to be like, "My range is this like magical entity that determines my EV, and I need to get it

right in every moment, even though I've only got one part of it." They're not going to do that. And when you look at a

pro, they know what range versus range looks like. They know how the node operates. The decision point operates in

theory. They have a sort of intrinsic feel roughly for ranges and what they're doing. And then they play their hand as

well as they think they can in that context. But the midweet is going to try to treat loads of hands that are totally

differently the same that are totally different the same and is going to confuse what Eevee actually causally

relates to. It relates to your hand, not your range. If you bluff that river and you're

getting 10% more folds than you should, which you do, by the way, in lots of bet check bet spots. There's a little tidbit

tit for you. There you go. I can't speak today. There's a tidbit for you. You know, that's a good node to bluff in

generally speaking. Not always. There are exceptions, but that's generally a good node to bluff in, and you should

make that bluff. And if you happen to be over bluffing there,

it's still profitable for you to make that bluff because presumably that opponent I just described that doesn't

really know you doesn't know that you're overbluffing. If they did, the whole pool would know, right? Cuz they're just

a random member of the pool and then the node wouldn't be overvolted, right? So you can sort of reason that one out of

existence. So stop caring about your own balance, your own range, whether you're overluffing or underluffing. Nothing

good will happen to you because you get a bluff to value ratio right. nothing good will happen to you. If you make a

winning bluff a thousand times, lots of good things will happen to you and they're called dollars generally. Right.

The second sort of poker player that has almost no shot at this game is,

how do I describe this? Let's call them the victim or the monster hunter because they're seeing

monsters everywhere that they want to take down. They think that all of their opponents are big bad bullies. There's

shadows on the wall. They see villains, literal villains everywhere. But I'm going to stick with the victim because

what the victim will do is they'll make it all about them, but in a completely different way to the my range guy. The

my range guy was was trying not to be unbalanced, wanted to be unexploitable, wanted to have some perfect construction

of a concept that doesn't even exist really in any functional way, their own range in that moment in time. The victim

wants to never be bullied out of a pot. The victim will make egregious calls because their hand label is good or even

great. their objective hand label like flush straight trips full house. They will ignore their opponent's line and

all of the clues that tip them off to the fact that they're just beat here really frequently and they will

construct arguments to make horrific win rate destroying debilitating calls and the victim is everywhere.

I say victim because this desire to protect yourself from being bluffed first and foremost and to see people as

bluffing or overbluffing in spots where they're actually under bluffing comes from a protective instinct in the human

psyche. a desire to make sure that you are not bullied and run over and have your stuff

taken, your lunch money taken by another another human because that equals not surviving, right? When that happens to

you, especially where we evolved without the protection of a state, you know, in the jungle or the savannah or whatever

it was, like if that happens to you and you're kicked out the tribe and you're bullied, you're dead. You're done for.

So, we're very very guarded against people taking advantage of us. That's why when you think someone's treating

you unfairly, you get really angry, right? Like when you think someone is really taking liberties with you and

trying to get stuff from you and treat you unfairly and exploit you in some way, you get really mad. And in poker,

the whole game is about exploiting people and making them fall too much and running them over and stuff like that,

or at least a large part of it. But your brain doesn't understand that. Your lizard brain, the one at the the back of

your skull, it doesn't get that. And it's like, "Oh no, big baddy coming after me, trying to make me fold again.

I call. I have trips. Trips no good." What do you mean trips no good? God, I'm so unlucky. How can they always have it?

I'll tell you why they always have it. Because you always call in spots where they're close to never bluffing. That's

why they always have it. Surely they're bluffing sometimes. No, actually they're not bluffing sometimes when they giant

check raise the turn and jam the river at 10L. They're not bluffing sometimes. It's like 3%. So, you don't see that

very often, right? So, this is a hell of a lot of students. And in my coaching career, one of the

first things I would always do towards the end especially is I would just turn on a losing pot filter and I'd look at

the times they lost stacks, but they had decisions to make after the turn. So, they weren't all in on the flop or pre

flop. And I would look at the river calls and I would go through them with the student and I would say, "Horrific,

losing about 27 big blinds of EV. Horrible. Quite bad. This one's close to a cooler but debatable. There were very

few coolers in there. Do you know how many of those hands the calling station student, the victim student would think

were just setups that were just coolers before we looked at it? Most of them. How many were actually coolers? None of

them. Do you know how the victim student would react when I then said, "Why did you do this?" They would say, "I don't

know. I can't believe I did that most of the time." When I took them out of that in-game I'm threatened by a rival

competitor environment. When I took them out of that adversarial

fighting for resources landscape of poker and I asked them in a teaching learning environment, what are you

doing? They were like, I've made a terrible call. I I don't know. This is so embarrassing. This is just awful. I

can't believe this is happening in a coaching session. I thought we would be talking about something advanced and

maybe I could learn about blockers and instead you're just showing me that I punted off 19 stacks in a week. And

you're not going to win at poker when you punt off 19 stacks in a week. There's no room for that. You you can't

do it. But this is this is so many students. This is probably 60% of students have debilitating river calling

leaks in spots where their opponent isn't bluffing enough. Maybe 70%. It's most of you. So for most of you in your

current form watching this, you don't make enough good folds when your hand is quite good, but the action tells you

you're dead. And because of that, you punt off loads of stacks in spots where you almost never win. and you bluff

catch where people are almost never bluffing. And because of that, you are stuck at 5 and L, 10 and L or whatever.

And the the main cure for this, by the way, there's two things you can do. First is acknowledging the mental game

leak and seeing where it comes from and treating it with a little bit more skepticism and objectivity. But the

other thing you can do is get good at bluff catching. We actually start that in Bronze Carrot. That's our

introductory course. It's the thing to do after the starter kit or even before if you want. It's 15 episodes. There's a

lot of stuff about calling bets in there and making bets. Why we bet why we call absolutely fundamental and so many

people just don't have this down and that's what causes this victim mentality. The fear of being bullied to

run riot. You you heard the expression the devil makes hard work for idle hands. What is it? Something like this.

The the devil will get you if you're not occupied in the good, right? Something like that is the old um religious

u saying, right? Let's say so in poker, what happens is that your caveman instincts will get you if you don't have

understanding of the game to do the thinking with, right? If you don't wield the tools to actually solve the spot,

well, the caveman that doesn't want to get bullied will just step in and solve it for it. He'll be like, "Okay, there's

nothing here that necessarily tells me what to do. So, I'll just defer back to don't fold trips because then they're

taking advantage of me and taking my stuff. I've got trips. You're not taking my stuff when I've got trips. call

that's what will happen and it's happening constantly to you. Let's face it, it is it's happening all the time

and you need to face it and then you need to work on your game so you understand how the spot works. You need

to attack this from both sides if you want to cure yourself of this. Okay. The third thing I want to talk about today,

the third type of player who also suffers from main character syndrome, both the range guy and that stationary

victim player, they make themselves the protagonist. They're worried about what's happening to them or what could

happen to them in the former case, right? And the third player type, it's just the same, but it's the green leak,

as we as we say in the starter kit, link in description. The green leak is when we are avoiding good investments. We're

making bad non-investments either by folding too much. Not what I'm going to talk about here cuz that's just not that

many of you. Okay, as in some spots, but yeah, fold the river first before you worry about that. What I'm going to talk

about here is not bluffing enough. Massive leak. And people who don't bluff enough, by the way, they don't generally

value bet thinly enough either. They're they just check. They have a very very

bad red line because they don't make much money by making people fold and therefore they don't get

back much of the money that they lose by just like posting the big blind and folding or calling and check folding the

flop. the natural things that happen to you in cards, right? So, this player with the green leak, I want to call them

the self-conscious bluffer, right? They're the player that can't bluff because they feel awkward about it. They

feel a sense of impending shame. They almost feel like it has to work much more than it does. So, you can let me

know in the comments if this this fits, right? If this sounds like you. This player also has a very low chance of

success until they cure this because they get to the river in that same bet, check bet opportunity spot, right?

They've got the chance to make this bluff. Are they going to make the bluff? It is a winning bluff. Let's say we're

watching it from the outside. We can watch hero in the spot. And hero checks. And why does hero check? Partly doesn't

have enough theory to know that that's just a winning bluff in theory. It's a queen river. It's really good for your

range. You got bluff the queen river, right? When it goes bet generally on a low board. They don't know that. So

there's the theory problem. Coming right back into this again. So many of these things are partially caused by a lack of

theory, but not fully because the other side of it is, well, that's then arbitrary. If you don't know whether

it's a good bluff or not, you should be indifferent between bluffing or not bluffing, right? You shouldn't really be

able to make the decision. Yet, this player always checks. So, why does the guy with the green leaks always check?

Because they feel like if they're going to try and take something, steal something, win something, they don't

have a good enough hand to be entitled to, then it should almost always work. Because if you were going to steal

something in real life, right? I mean, most of us have probably stolen something at some point. Do you remember

Pogs? The little cardboard discs? I'm showing my age here. I did say I was 40 at the start of this video. Well, in

about 1996, Pogs were were all the rage. You'd hit these cardboard discs with plastic discs to try to flip them over

and win them from your opponents. I had the biggest Pog collection in my whole school. I was the Pogman. My nickname

was Pogman at one point. No wonder I became a poker player, right? Like, of course, the writing was on the wall, you

could say. Well, anyway, one time a teacher decided to ban Pogs because a parent had said, "My son's lost all his

Pogs to Pete Clark, the expert Pog player." That's pretty good with with certain plastic disc slammers they were

called. Anyway, um I digress. The teacher confiscated my Pogs, put them in her desk, and then decided to leave the

drawer to her desk open that afternoon accidentally. And I saw them, and I was like, "You know what? Screw this. I'm

taking them back. And that was like tilt me taking the Pogs back because the chance of me

getting away with that was almost zero. And that's like when you make a crazy awful bluff into a really strong range

that you know you shouldn't make. And that's not actually what I'm talking about. That's the opposite. What I'm

talking about with the player with the green leaks is that they want the bluff to get through almost always. Right? So

you shouldn't make terrible bluffs that never get through or nearly never get through like the one I did when I tried

to steal those pogs back. But you should make bluffs that get through a third of the time when you're betting third pot

because it only needs to work 25% of the time. Or if you're betting pot, 56% equity will make it really profitable.

Fold equity, sorry, will make it very profitable. So I see people all the time not bet the standard B75 sizing, right,

that they usually use. Everyone B75s every river ever at 10L. Let's all accept it. That's what you do. I know

it's fine. Don't worry about it. We'll fix it in time. But say you B75 the river. Do you know how many folds you

need? No, you don't know how many folds you need to be 75 the river as a bluff. Yet you

B75 the river is a bluff sometimes. No, but seriously this is an epidemic. People not knowing pots. You need about

42 43% fold equity there. Not 50. Do you know how much fold equity your brain if you are a self-conscious

bluffer is going to tell you that you need? Not even 50%. Cuz that'd be like stealing something that you'll only get

away with stealing half the time. Your brain will want like 70% success rate, 75 80 subconsciously to bluff the river.

You might not believe me or you might think that's crazy. Like on a conscious level when you understand the slightest

thing about pot you're risking less than one to win one. So of course it's less than 50%. But your subconscious doesn't

get that. It's never understood maths like if it hasn't learned maths in like 40 years or 20 or 57 years. Guess your

age. You're 57. Bam. Just got some of you. You know, then you're not it's never going to learn to do that. That's

the job of your prefrontal cortex is going to calculate stuff, right? But it's not the thing that's engaged and

firing neurons about the place when you have a bluff opportunity on the river. It's the caveman brain that's going,

"Nope, can't steal, might get killed, might get kicked out of the tribe and ostracized forever. Can't do it. Need

80% fold equity. Need 90% fold equity." But actually 65 when you need 43 is amazing. And these self-conscious

bluffers, these students with green leaks, they're just incapable of bluffing even in quite, you know,

mundane situations. They just defer to not doing it. It's just a big stretch for them to do it. It feels stressful.

It provokes anxiety. If you're watching this like, "Haha, bro, who are these people you talk about, Pete? Lol."

You're a bit of a [ __ ] But like, back to the the point at hand here, you just have red leaks instead, probably. Like

if that seems totally alien to you, you just have different leaks, right? And that's fine. We have red, blue, or green

leaks. There are three categories. They're not mutually exclusive. You can see which ones you have by doing the

test in the starter kit when you're done with this video. We're pretty much done with this video, but I'll summarize by

saying this. These three things are all main character syndrome. In the first case of

the my range guy, it's all about being protected and unexploitable, preemptive measures to make sure that nobody ever

takes advantage of you. It's like a more paranoid version of the victim actually in a sense in a more proactive version.

Then you have the victim that's like I'm just going to call you down because you're a big bully and you you're

bluffing me and I don't believe you and I've got trips. I'm just going to you're not going to push me around. You've got

that you've got that guy and that's again main character syndrome. You're making it about you. I'm being blah blah

blah. This person is doing this to me, right? You're making it about you once again. And the third type of player is

making it about you because you're like, I'm not safe. I can't bluff because I'm not safe bluffing. I'm I don't feel

comfortable enough doing it. It's all main character syndrome. It doesn't make you a bad person. It doesn't make you a

narcissist. It just makes you too self-focused in poker and you should see poker as if you're

outside of it. Like imagine you were outside of the universe. What would you see? We don't know, right? Cuz we don't

actually know what the full extent of the universe is. But I bet it would be pretty amazing if you could stand with

me outside of the universe and we could look down on it together. I bet we would just be full of wonder and it would be

like we'd see finally why everything was what it was and we wouldn't have to wonder. Is it just me that wonders about

this stuff or do you wonder about this stuff too? But we would see it all and it would be really really cool. Just

like when we see like galaxies zoomed out, it's amazing, right? I find that amazing.

And with poker that's kind of what you have to do. You have to place yourself outside of the game and you have to say,

"Okay, I've got like, okay, this is a hand on my screen. What's the EV of this hand if I do X, Y, or Zed based on my

opponent's range and strategy?" And then you don't even know your opponent. So, you can't have main character syndrome

about them. So, you have to zoom out and look at it at pool level and figure out what's best on average and make peace

with it and live with it and see how it fits into the greater framework of poker. You cannot be the main character,

the protagonist. You have to be a fascinated observer that gets to press a button after thinking for a while. I'll

leave you with that thought. Click the link, go to Carrot Corner, see what we're about, and I'll see you next time.

Bye for now.