A construction worker on the 3rd floor of a building needs a hacksaw. He sees another man on the 1st floor, and yells down to him, but the other guy can’t hear the instruction, so he motions for the man on the 3rd floor to do sign language. The guy who needs the saw, points at his eye meaning “I”. He then points at his knee meaning “need”, and moves his hand back and forth in a handsaw-cutting motion. The man on the 1st floor nods his head, pulls down his pants, and starts masturbating. The man on the 3rd floor gets so angry he runs down to the 1st floor and says,” What the heck is wrong with you? I said, “I need a saw!!” The other guy says, “I knew that, I was just trying to tell you that I’m coming.”
“Understanding” is the first step to improving your game. In most cases, GETTING profit is a lot easier than KEEPING profit.
In Part Two, we looked at:
- Hard work paying off in the future, while laziness rips you off now.
- Controlling your anticipation, while you survey the tables.
- How to apply a disciplined game-plan.
- Making “real-time” decisions with consistency.
- Reducing your initial risk, while increasing your discipline.
To move further in that process, let’s take a closer look at improving our game. You have to remember that you can have all of the “mechanical” things like dice-set, grip, stance, arm-motion, throw, trajectory, target-area, landing-spot and roll-out all figured out. However, if you don’t apply the required discipline, character and consistency, you will never be able to get, or hang onto enough profit to sustain your enjoyment of this game.
Character includes self-confidence, but doesn’t include false-confidence.
I like arriving in a casino, walking up to the craps table, and buying in for perhaps $1,000, knowing that 19-out-of-20 times, I will end that session with a decent profit.
Not every session ends with a profit, and even fewer of them end with a sensational win-fall. Sometimes I am overjoyed when I walk away with a $20 or $50 profit. Why? Because, having endured a session where everything just wasn’t clicking, I know that I am lucky to have even maintained my buy-in, and still been able to add a few sheckels of profit.
Sometimes, some sessions just go plain bad! Perhaps I make a bet on what appears to be a good shooter, only to have my bets wiped out before they can even pay for themselves. Or maybe my shooting is not up to par. It does happen.
And it happens with frightening consistency at the wrong time. Hey, there’s never a right time to lose, but it always seems to happen when you are least expecting it.
It usually happens when my confidence has outpaced my common-sense. Look at it this way. If you had ten, or fifteen, or twenty good sessions in a row, your confidence would be high, am I right? Okay, at that point you might start feeling like you can’t lose. You might think that you’ve got this Precision-Shooting thing dialed-in perfectly. I used to think that way too. Then I’d have a bad session that would bring me back to reality, and it would calm down my aggressive betting. Once again, I’d get on a great un-beaten streak, and my uncontained exuberance would once again cloud my judgment. I would start thinking like I’m superman or king-of-the-universe again. But reality would once again use it’s kryptonite foot to kick me in my over-confident balls.
It is at that point when you have to have your discipline and consistency-of-character dialed-in BETTER than your actual dice shooting-skills. Why? It’s because this is the point when you can let one losing session outstrip the profits from your ten or fifteen or twenty winning sessions, that’s why!
Consistency beats luck, but recognizing both is essential.
Taking advantage of your consistency is important. If you recognize that you generate a disproportionate amount of some “signature-numbers”, you are in a position to take advantage of that consistency.
I also like being able to confidently know that I can “turn the table around”, when it becomes my turn to shoot the dice. Even if the table has been “cold enough to sink the Titanic,” the forecast is pretty good that a tropical heat-wave of equatorial proportions is coming my way. Does it happen all the time? No, but it happens consistently enough that I know that there is a very good chance that it will.
How do I control the risk that this may be a bad roll? I keep my initial bets pretty small until my payoffs have covered all the bets I have on the table. Once they have paid for themselves, AND I have locked up a small profit; then I may increase my bets.
Now, let’s BRIEFLY talk about luck. I might be lucky enough to recognize when another player’s betting-method has a lot of potential, or when another Precision-Shooter is about to tear the roof off of the joint, or when a lucky random-roller is building what could be the roll-of-the-day. First you have to recognize that as a true opportunity. Then, what is important is to have the discipline to know what to do, and to have the consistency to apply the right moves, without hesitation. That takes a lot of character.
In Part Four of this series, we’ll look at exactly how to employ a Game Plan that will help to:
- Determine your motivation and help in setting your goals.
- Understand yourself, and how to live with those limitations and opportunities.
- Determine when your discipline, character and consistency need a tune-up.
Until then…
Good Luck & Good Skill at the Tables…and in Life.
The Mad Professor
