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Diamond: the part that ignores how well you play

Every other section of this guide is about decisions. This one is about the things that happen whether you decide well or not.

Three of them matter. The house takes a cut of the money, which at small stakes can be larger than the entire edge that careful play produces. Correct play loses for stretches, sometimes long ones, and that is arithmetic rather than misfortune. And in a tournament the blinds keep rising underneath you, so the patience that was a virtue an hour ago quietly turns into a cost.

None of this is a reason to play worse. It is a reason to know what you are sitting down to, so a bad night reads as a bad night rather than evidence that the system is broken.