See also General Poker Tips (Part II)

Two things that separate the good player from the bad player:

• The difference in the game is how you play the bad hands and marginal hands. There's nothing new about this statement - it has been written many times before. Almost every player in the world knows what to do with the good hands. And if such hands are virtually "self-playable", then it follows that one secret of the game must reside in how the bad hands are played, and the marginal hands. It is what you do with these hands that makes the difference in the game (and what gives the better player his edge).
• The way a player responds when his game hits the skids is another thing that separates the good players from the bad. Every poker player will go into mind-numbing "free fall" at one time or another in his poker career. This is that well-known state where every single thing that can possibly can go wrong goes wrong. How the person responds to this is another indicator of expertise. Did you come away from this poker session with a $400 loss? Or an $1100 loss? When your game started going downhill, did you try to "play through it" using prudence and common sense? Or did you jam the accelerator to the floor and increase the magnitude of the disaster as you barreled downhill?

A good player is someone who can have many things go wrong and still keep his losses to a moderate amount. As a player, this is another goal to have the kind of game where things can go disastrously wrong six or eight or twelve times, and then go right only a few times and you recover enough to keep your losses manageable or break even. (For this means that in sessions where things aren't going drastically wrong, you're going to be ahead).

If a player misinterprets times or luck as times of skill, then disaster a waits, because at some future point he will call upon this supposed skill when it doesn't really exist.
Know why you won. If it was luck, call it by its right name.
Players who accept the bountiful gifts of luck and recast them as skill are flirting with disaster. Notions such as, "I'm outplaying the others - maybe even the whole table" during a run of good luck promise storm clouds on the far horizon.
It is necessary that we have an accurate assessment of ourselves and our game. Poker is very unsparing to people who lie to themselves.

See the first "bad beat" after a long winning streak as the doorway into hell.
For some unknown reason, this is often the case. Things often seem to go downhill from that point on. It takes the wind out of our sails, and nothing seems to go right after that. We may have been winning steadily and comfortably up to that point, but once we took that one huge bad beat (or perhaps made that one big mistake that cost us a pot), things seemed to unravel. It affected our play. (How often have you heard something like the following: "You know, after I lost with those four fives that time, I don't think I won another hand"). For whatever reason, it affected us and derailed our game. Whenever a winning streak is interrupted by a bad beat, be careful from then on.

Don't try to stretch a win.
Don't get greedy. Be happy with the amount of your profit.
When the game started, you would have been thrilled to death to win $100. But now you find yourself up $300, and you're starting to dream a little bigger. Suddenly, nothing less than a $500 or $600 win will suffice. In order to make this happen, you are trying to "force" things a little, and this ends up with you overplaying your cards and losing a good portion of your chips back. Don't "press"; be happy with whatever profit level you manage to attain.
Don't lei a pipe-dream form in your mind with visions of ever greater riches. Play solid cards. Don't try to stretch a single into a triple. Don't try to turn a triple into an inside-the-park home run. It may have been meant to be a triple.