Posting a bad beat and wondering how you could have played it differently is a little like a fat guy posting a picture of himself eating a carrot and asking if he’s eating properly.

You know what I’m talking about, I’m sure. I refer to the posts asking a question of the kind “I lost this hand. How could I have played it differently?”

The implied question is “how should I have played this hand to win it?” and it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the game of poker works. This game isn’t played hand-by-hand, it’s played lifetime-by-lifetime. The best players in the world, the Bobby Fishers of our game if you will, will still typically lose 8 or 9 hands out of 10 that they’re dealt. You don’t win at poker by winning hands, you win at poker by winning money.

I can’t stress this enough. Some hands you’re just destined to lose. No expert is able to lay down aces full when his opponent rivers quads, and if you think that your biggest “leak” is that you weren’t able to fold when the second 9 hit the river, you’re delusional. But the significance of these hands is drowned by the thousands and yet thousands of hands where your opponent doesn’t hit a one-outer on the river. Moral of the story? If you’re focusing on one hand, you’re missing the big picture.

Think big. Think thousands of hands. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. It’s true that the micro-perspectives add up to form the macro-perspective, but focusing too much on the micro may cause you to lose sight of what matters: the macro.

This is why so many of the more experienced players and posters here talk about tilting being our biggest leak. Why we cringe at being out of position, because experience teaches us just how much better position is. Why we harp on bankroll management and perhaps why we don’t post a lot in the Bad Beat Board. With enough games played under your belt, you come to realize that each individual hand is not at all as significant as the bigger picture.

Poker is a lot like chess.

Macro-poker, that is. Win the war, not the battles.